We see in this evolution a great future for the Trade Unions, if they will, in organisation and personal equipment, rise to the height of their enlarged function. They will need, by amalgamation or federation, and by affording facilities for easy admission and for a simple transfer of membership, to make themselves much more nearly than at present co-extensive with their several industries. They will have to make special provision in their constitutions to secure an effective representation, on their own executive and legislative councils, of distinct crafts, grades, or specialisations, which must always form small minorities of the whole body. They will find it necessary to make the local organisation of their members, in branch or district, much more coincident than at present with their members’ several places of employment, so as to approximate to making identical the workshop and the branch. There would seem to be a great development opening up for the Works Committees and the “Shop Stewards,” brought effectively into organic relation with the nationally settled industrial policy. At any rate, in industries already passing under the control of Associations of Consumers, whether by nationalisation or municipalisation, or by the spread of consumers’ co-operation, there will be great scope for District Councils and National Boards, as well as for Advisory and Research Committees representative of different specialities, in which managers and foremen, technicians and operatives, will jointly supersede the capitalist Board of Directors. But the management of each industry is very far from being the whole of the task. In Parliament itself, and on Municipal Councils, the World of Labour, by hand or by brain, will need to give a continuous and an equal backing to its own political party, in order to see to it that it has its own representatives—specialised and trained for this supreme political function—not by ones and twos, but in force; gradually coming, in fact, to predominate over the representatives of the surviving capitalist and landlord parties. Trade Unionists, in the mass, will not only have to continue and extend the loyalty and self-devotion which have always been characteristic of successful Trade Unionism, but also to acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the working of democratic institutions, a more accurate appreciation of the imperative necessity of combining both the leading types of democratic self-government—on the one hand the self-government based on the common needs of the whole population divided into geographical constituencies, and on the other the self-government springing from the special requirements of men and women bound together by the fellowship of a common task and a common technique. The Trade Unions and Professional Societies, if they are increasingly to participate in the government of their industries and services, will in particular have to provide themselves with a greater number of whole-time specialist representatives, better paid and more considerately treated than at present, and supplied with increased opportunities for education and training.
We end on a note of warning. The object and purpose of the workers, organised vocationally in Trade Unions and Professional Associations, and politically in the Labour Party, is no mere increase of wages or reduction of hours.[738] It comprises nothing less than a reconstruction of society, by the elimination, from the nation’s industries and services, of the Capitalist Profitmaker, and the consequent shrinking up of the class of functionless persons who live merely by owning. Profit-making as a pursuit, with its sanctification of the motive of pecuniary self-interest, is the demon that has to be exorcised. The journey of the Labour Party towards its goal must necessarily be a long and arduous one. In the painful “Pilgrim’s Progress” of Democracy the workers will be perpetually tempted into by-paths that lead only to the Slough of Despond. It is not so much the enticing away of individuals in the open pursuit of wealth that is to be feared, as the temptation of particular Trade Unions, or particular sections of the workers, to enter into alliances with Associations of Capitalist Employers for the exploitation of the consumer. “Co-partnership,” or profit-sharing with individual capitalists, has been seen through and rejected. But the “co-partnership” of Trade Unions with Associations of Capitalists—whether as a development of “Whitley Councils” or otherwise—which far-sighted capitalists will presently offer in specious forms (with a view, particularly, to Protective Customs Tariffs and other devices for maintaining unnecessarily high prices, or to governmental favours and remissions of taxation) is, we fear, hankered after by some Trade Union leaders, and might be made seductive to particular grades or sections of workers. Any such policy, however plausible, would in our judgement be a disastrous undermining of the solidarity of the whole working class, and a formidable obstacle to any genuine Democratic Control of Industry, as well as to any general progress in personal freedom and in the more equal sharing of the National Product.
FOOTNOTES:
[707]See his Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart, 1871-72; his more generalised survey, Das Arbeitsverhältniss gemäss den heutigen Recht(Leipsic, 1877), translated as The Relation of Labour to the Law of To-day(New York, 1890); and his article on “The Growth of a Trades Union,” in the North British Review, October 1870.
[708]Sec. 24 of the Factory Act of 1891 provides, as regards textile manufactures, that the employer shall supply every worker by the piece with certain particulars as to the quantity of work and rate of remuneration for it.
[709]History of Trade Unionism, by S. and B. Webb, 1st ed., 1894, pp. 476-78.
[710]The most important sources of information are the Annual Reports of the Trades Union Congress, 1874-1919, and other publications of its Parliamentary Committee; those of the Annual Conferences of the Labour Representation Committee, 1901-5, and of the Labour Party, 1906-19, together with the Party’s other publications, especially Labour and the New Social Order, 1918; the reports and contemporary publications of the Socialist Societies, especially the Independent Labour Party from 1893, and the Fabian Society from 1884; Labour Year Book for 1916 and 1919; History of British Socialism, by M. Beer, vol. ii., 1920; History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, 2 vols., 1910, 1916; Die englische Arbeiterpartei, by G. Guettler, 1914; Aims of Labour, by Rt. Hon. A. Henderson, 1918; History of the Fabian Society, by E. R. Pease, 1916; History of Labour Representation, by A. W. Humphrey, 1912; biographies of Joseph Arch, Henry Broadhurst, Robert Applegarth, Thomas Burt, John Wilson, J. H. Thomas, W. J. Davis, etc.
[711]The movement for “Labour Representation” (which “at that time meant working-men members of Parliament and nothing else,” History of Labour Representation, by A. W. Humphrey, 1912) was first got under way by George Potter’s London Working Men’s Association in 1866, mentioned at the end of Chapter VI. At the second Trades Union Congress, at Birmingham in 1869, a paper had been read on “Direct Labour Representation in Parliament,” but Congress took no action. A separate “Labour Representation League” was then formed under the presidency of R. M. Lathom, a Chancery barrister, to which many leading Trade Unionists belonged, of which Henry Broadhurst was secretary from 1872 to about 1878, and which sought from the Liberal Party opportunities for the return of a few working-class members; but (as formerly in the cases of William Newton’s contest for the Tower Hamlets in 1852 and George Odger’s at Southwark in 1870) in vain. At the General Election of 1874, as we have already described, fourteen workmen went to the poll; but in ten of the constituencies they were fought by both parties, and only in the other four did the Liberals allow them to be fought by Conservatives alone, with the result that two only (out of the latter four) were elected, namely, Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt. At the General Election in 1880, again with Liberal acquiescence, Henry Broadhurst was added to their number; and in 1885 this was raised to eleven (of whom six were miners). All these, whilst pushing measures desired by the Trade Unions, acted habitually with the Liberal Party. In 1886—the Labour Representation League having faded away about 1881—the Congress appointed a “Labour Electoral Committee” to do the same work; but this was never able to free itself from subserviency to the Liberal Party, and it achieved no success, dying away in 1893. Some personal reminiscences are given in “Labour Representation Thirty Years Ago,” by Henry Broadhurst, M.P., in the Fourth Annual Report of General Federation of Trade Unions, 1903; see also History of Labour Representation, by A. W. Humphrey, 1912.
[712]In a “scribbling diary” of 1884 is the following entry:
“Written by Jas. K. Hardie, born August 15, 1856, married August 3, 1879, began work as a message boy in Glasgow when 8 years and 9 months old, wrought for some time also in a printing office in Trongate, in the brass finishing shop of the Anchor Line Shipping Co., also as a rivet heater in Thompson’s heatyard. Left Glasgow in the year 1866 and went into No. 18 pit of the Moss at Newarthill, from thence to Quarter Iron Works, and again to one or two other collieries in neighbourhood of Hamilton. Was elected Secretary to Miners’ Association in 1878, and for the same position in Ayrshire in 1879; resigned April, 1882, when got appointment unsolicited as correspondent to Cumnock News. Brought up an atheist, converted to Christianity in 1878.”