Whilst the numerical strength and industrial and political influence of the several Trade Unions have thus steadily increased during the past thirty years, it is less easy to characterise the changes in the relations of Trade Unions with each other.
The multiplicity of separate organisations in which the six or seven million Trade Unionists are grouped, and the complication and diversity of the relations among the various societies, continue to-day, as they did thirty years ago, to baffle classification, and almost to defy analysis. It remains as impossible as it was in 1890 to state precisely how many distinct Trade Unions are in existence, because the endless variety of their federal organisations makes it uncertain which of the local or sectional Unions are to be counted as independent societies. We estimate, however, that upon any computation the number of financially distinct organisations, which we may put at about 1100, remains approximately what it was thirty years ago. The tendency to amalgamation, that is to say, has just about kept pace, arithmetically, with the starting of new organisations, whilst the average membership of each unit has more than quadrupled.
Such a statement fails, however, to do justice to the change that has come over the Trade Union world. Thirty years ago it was, on the whole, a congeries of numerically small units, only two or three of which counted as many as 50,000 members. To-day there are nearly a dozen which severally manage memberships of a quarter of a million, and probably fifty which deal with more than 50,000 each. A few other national societies of smaller membership are of some importance. Scattered up and down the United Kingdom a thousand other local or sectional societies exist, with memberships from a few dozen to a few thousand, but these play no part and exercise no influence in the movement as a whole. Probably five-sixths of all the Trade Union membership, and practically all its effective force, are to be found among the hundred principal societies to which the Ministry of Labour has long confined its detailed statistics. [631]
The movement for the amalgamation of competing societies has, during the past decade, been specially energetic and persistent. This has arisen, partly spontaneously, from the obvious disadvantages attendant both on rivalry between Trade Unions seeking to enrol the same classes of members throughout the kingdom—such as that between the various societies of railway employees—and on the division of workmen of the same craft among a number of independent local societies, such as the Coopers, the Chippers and Drillers, and the Painters and other branches of the Building Trades. But during the past decade the movement has been reinforced by the desire for an organisation based on the whole of an industry, such as engineering, housebuilding, mining, or the railway service, in which all the co-operating crafts and grades of workers would be associated in a single Industrial Union; in contrast with the earlier conception of the separate organisation of each craft throughout the whole kingdom; such as that of the carpenters, the enginemen, the engineering mechanics, the clerks, and by analogy the general labourers, in whatsoever industry they may be working. The case for the Industrial Union in such an industry as mining, for example, merely from the standpoint of Collective Bargaining, and for the sake of getting effective Common Rules, has always been a strong one; but the movement for the substitution of “Industrial” for “Craft” Unionism has been strengthened since about 1911 by the aspirations of those who saw in Trade Unionism something more than an organisation for raising wages and shortening the working day. If the wage-earners were ever to obtain, through their own voluntary associations, the control of their own working lives, and to obtain a steadily increasing participation in the direction of industry; if a Vocational Democracy were to be superimposed on a Democracy based on geographical constituencies; it seemed as if this could be done only by Trade Unions co-extensive with each separate industry. The influence of the movement known as “Guild Socialism” has accordingly been exercised, on the whole, in favour of Industrial Unionism, not so much for the sake of its immediate advantages in improving the conditions of the wage-contract, as because it was only in this form that Trade Unionism could become the vehicle of aspirations to the control of each industry by the whole mass of the workers employed therein.
Except in the way of industrial federations, to be hereafter referred to, it is only in mining and the railway service that any great progress has been made in this direction. The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, established, as we have seen, only in 1888, with no more than 36,000 members, has attracted to itself, year by year, an almost continuous stream of local or sectional organisations among the 1,200,000 workers in and about the coal and iron-stone mines; successively absorbing into one or other of its local units or affiliating directly to itself, not only all the district associations, old or new, of coal-hewers and other underground workers, but also some of the separate organisations of enginemen and firemen, mine mechanics, deputies and overmen, colliery clerks, cokemen, and others employed in or about the mines, until its aggregate membership in 1920 is somewhere about 900,000. And though the Miners’ Federation is still only a Federation of fully autonomous district associations—some of these, too, being themselves federations of the organisations of lesser localities; and although it still depends for its funds almost entirely upon specific levies upon its constituents, it has found means, by its frequently meeting delegate conferences, controlling the strong Executive Committee which they elect, to centralise very effectively the general policy of the whole mining industry, notably with regard to the hours of labour, the conditions of safety, the percentage of general advances of wages and the amount of the national war bonuses, and last, though not least, on the burning issue of nationalisation of the mines and the participation of the miners in their administration. But although the Miners’ Federation embodies in its constitution the principles of federalism and an extreme local autonomy, it takes no account of sectional differences, and makes no provision for the representation at its delegate conferences, or upon its Executive Committee, of any distinct grades or sections. Perhaps, for this reason, the Federation does not yet speak directly for all the organised manual working wage-earners in the industry. There are at least forty separate Trade Unions of enginemen, boilermen and firemen, colliery mechanics, cokemen, under-managers, deputies, overmen and other officials, colliery clerks, and surface-workers of various kinds, not yet affiliated to the Miners’ Federation, either locally or nationally; these have formed National Federations, parallel with the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, of enginemen, deputies, colliery mechanics and under-managers respectively; and in February 1917 seventeen of the societies drew together to form the National Council of Colliery Workers other than Miners, for the purpose of maintaining their separate influence.
In the railway service, as we have already described, the merging in the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, first of the Scottish Society in 1892, and then of the General Railway Workers’ Union, and the United Signalmen and Pointsmen’s Society in 1913, made possible the establishment of the National Union of Railwaymen on the basis of an organisation co-extensive with the industry, with the embodiment in the constitution of sectional representation. The four “departments” into which the members are divided vote separately in the elections. Under these provisions the National Union of Railwaymen, though hampered by the continuance of the separate Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, has been able to make effective not only its claims for higher remuneration, but also its demands for a normal Eight Hours Day, a national system of classification, and national wage scales for the several grades; though still not its aspirations (expressed since 1914) to participation in management, or those (expressed for over a decade) to the elimination from industry of the capitalist profitmaker by the scheme of Railway Nationalisation.
In other industries, too, the concentration of Trade Union forces during the past decade has increasingly taken the form of an amalgamation of rival sectional organisations, sometimes in response to a demand from the rank and file. Thus the Ship Constructors’ and Shipwrights’ Association, established in 1888, has successfully absorbed not only the very old Shipwrights’ Provident Union of London, but also all the remaining local Trade Unions of shipwrights that long lingered in Liverpool, Dublin, etc. The National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association has taken over a number of small societies of French polishers, gilders, and upholsterers. The United Garment Workers’ Trade Union was formed in 1915 by the amalgamation of a number of societies in the various sections of the tailoring trade; and in 1919 it was agreed that this, together with the Scottish Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, should be merged in the old Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, which would then include practically all the organised workers in the making of men’s and women’s clothing in Great Britain. Many small Unions of machine workers, minor craftsmen, and general labourers have been absorbed in one or other of the half-a-dozen large Labour Unions. The Amalgamated Card and Blowing-Room Operatives have taken over various small sectional societies in the Cotton trade. In Sheffield thirteen small Unions, catering for different sections of the gold and silver workers, joined together in 1910 in the Gold, Silver, and Kindred Trades Society, which in 1913 absorbed several more societies in this industry. In the autumn of 1919, as we have already mentioned, six of the sectional societies in the engineering industry decided to merge themselves, with the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, in a new and more gigantic amalgamation with 400,000 members; the United Pattern Makers’ Society, the Electrical Trades Union, and many small and specialised societies of mechanics in iron still standing aloof. In the same month three of the principal Unions of postal and telegraph employees united in a single Union of Post Office Workers, with 90,000 members. Other amalgamations among small or local societies took place among the Basketmakers, the Block Printers, the Leather-workers, the Dyers, the various sections in the Pottery Trade, etc.
Such amalgamation is greatly obstructed by legal requirements. Down to 1917 the law demanded that each society desiring to unite should ratify the decision by a two-thirds majority not merely of those voting, but of the entire membership. Such a poll is almost impossible of attainment by Trade Unions, whose members cannot usually be individually communicated with, owing not only to their frequent changes of residence and the absence of many of them abroad, but also to the lack, in most cases, of any complete register of addresses. In 1917 the Government at last permitted the passage of an Amending Act for which Trade Unionists had often pressed; but even then insisted on any amalgamation being carried, at a 50 per cent poll of the whole membership, by at least 20 per cent majority, conditions which make amalgamation everywhere difficult, and in some Unions (such as those of seamen) quite impossible. In several cases Unions in which the general opinion has been in favour of amalgamation have failed to get the necessary vote. We have already described the ingenious device by which the British Steel Smelters’ Society and the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation surmounted this difficulty.
Meanwhile, of federations as distinct from amalgamations the Trade Union world has a variety more bewildering than ever, some of which have already been referred to. We have to note that the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades Federation, the establishment of which in 1889 we described in Industrial Democracy, has continued in existence, doing useful work from time to time in connection with demarcation disputes and other subjects of inter-union controversy, especially on the North-East Coast, notably contributing also in 1905 to the successful claim of the Clyde trades to weekly instead of fortnightly pays, which the employers had stubbornly resisted for a whole decade, but continuing to be weakened by the abstention, except for a few years, of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, which, however, now frequently consents to act in conjunction with it in general trade questions.
What is significant is the change in type and purpose of these multifarious industrial federations, which have now come to form an important element in the Trade Union world.[632] Federation, in fact, has undergone a subtle change of character. Instead of loose alliances for mutual support in disputes, or for the adjustment of mutual differences as to “demarcation” and transfer of members, the federations of all the craft or sectional Unions engaged in particular industries—notably those of the Building Trades, the Transport Workers, and, though not yet to the same extent, the Printing Trades and the Woollen Workers, like the older organisation of the Cotton Operatives—have become increasingly, themselves negotiating bodies, recognised by the equally organised employers, and concerting with these what are, in effect, national regulations governing their industries throughout the whole kingdom. The later development of the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades Federation has been in the same direction. In the case of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain the development has gone still further; and this great organisation, whilst retaining the federal form, and, even now, not completely admitted to “recognition” by the Mining Association of Great Britain, unquestioningly acts for the whole industry in national issues, as if it were an “amalgamated” Union. Whether or not we are to see all the rival and sectional Unions in each industry amalgamating into a single “Industrial Union,” as many Trade Unionists desire, it must be recognised that the development, during the past decade, of active negotiating federations for the several industries goes far to supply the most urgent need. In short, although financially distinct Trade Unions remain, on the whole, as numerous as ever, the number of separate negotiating bodies, so far as concerns matters relating to an industry as a whole, becomes steadily smaller.
We pass now to federal bodies of a different character.
In 1899, arising out of the losses caused by the costly engineering dispute of 1897-98, the Trades Union Congress established a General Federation of Trade Unions, largely at the instance of Robert Knight, the able secretary of the Boilermakers, designed exclusively as a mutual reinsurance agency against the heavy financial burden to which, in the form of Strike Pay, or Dispute or Contingent Benefit, labour disputes subject every active trade society.[633] By means of a small contribution from a large aggregate membership (1s. or 2s. per year per member), the General Federation is able to recoup to its constituent societies 2s. 6d. or 5s. per week per member affected towards their several expenditures upon disputes. Beginning with 44 societies, having a total membership of 343,000, it steadily increased the number of its adherents until, in 1913, it had affiliated as many as 150 societies, having at that date 884,291 members. Since that time the number of societies has dropped to 141 in 1919; but their increase in membership had raised the aggregate affiliation to 1,215,107, the largest ever recorded. The General Federation, whilst suffering for the past seven years from an arrest of growth, has to its credit twenty years’ success in surmounting the difficulties which have destroyed every previous attempt of the kind, and its prudent management is shown by the fact that it was able, from its normal revenue, to discharge all its obligations down to 1905, and to accumulate a reserve of £119,656. In that year the members rashly insisted on a reduction of the contribution by one-third, not foreseeing the outburst of disputes in 1908-9, which caused the Federation to pay out for 638 disputes no less than £122,778, and necessitated in 1913 the doubling of the contribution. Since that date, in spite of payments to societies averaging £1500 every week of the year, the Federation has not only met its engagements, but also built up a reserve exceeding a quarter of a million sterling. In 1911 it formed an Approved Society under the National Insurance Act, with the object of relieving the separate Trade Unions, and notably the thousand small ones, from the onerous task of separately administering the Act, and to ensure that their members did not go off to the Industrial Insurance Companies, an effort which has failed to attract more than a few thousand members. An extension of the effort to the provision of death benefits, by the formation of a Friendly Society section in 1913, has proved scarcely more successful.
It must be recognised that during the past six or seven years the Federation has lost favour with important sections of the Trade Union world. It was probably inevitable that its inclusion of small sectional societies should eventually bring it into conflict with the larger Unions by whom such societies are often regarded as illegitimate competitors. Grounds of this kind may be assigned for the secession of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the Amalgamated Society of Tailors in 1915; and for the powerful hostility shown since 1913 by the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. But this feeling has been accentuated by a growing resentment of the part played by the General Federation—not unconnected with the forceful personality of the General Secretary—first in international relations, and secondly in the representation of Trade Union opinion to the Government and to the public.
The General Federation, from its very establishment, affiliated itself to the International Trade Union Federation, which aimed at the collection and publication of statistics of Trade Unionism all over the world by an International Trade Union Secretariat, and at the mutual interchange of Trade Union information. For the first fifteen years of its existence this action of the General Federation was not objected to, although the fact that it represented only 25 to 30 per cent of British Trade Unionism impaired the value of its statistical contributions. The Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, which might well have undertaken the task, long ignored its international interests; but during the Great War increasingly resented the appearance of the General Federation as the representative of British Trade Unionism, and especially the almost continuous negotiations between its secretary, Mr. Appleton, and Mr. Gompers, the Secretary of the American Federation of Labor, and with M. Jouhaux, the Secretary of the Confédération Générale du Travail of France, along lines not consistent with those of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress. When, in 1918, attempts were made to reconstitute the International Federation of Trade Unions, the Parliamentary Committee claimed at first to be itself the representative of Great Britain; but presently compromised on a joint and equal representation by the two bodies.
But more serious than the question of international representation was the resentment at the ever-widening range of subjects at home on which Mr. Appleton, the Management Committee, and the Conferences of the General Federation claimed to voice the feelings of Organised Labour. It was urged that the Federation was formed exclusively for the purpose of mutually reinsuring Strike Benefit, and that it had accordingly no mandate, and did nothing but weaken the Trade Union forces, both in the narrow field of the conditions of the wage contract, and on the broader issues of Labour’s political aspirations, whenever it entered into rivalry with the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress on the one hand, or with the Labour Party on the other. It looks as if the General Federation must in future either restrict itself to the limited range of its original purpose, or else run the risk of being financially weakened by the secession of influential Trade Unions, which will not permanently remain affiliated to all three national bodies, when finding these speaking on the same subjects with different voices.
Of another form of loose federation of the branches of all the Trade Unions within a given area we have already described the origin and the development in the local Trades Councils. These have gone on increasing in number, much more than in strength, until in 1920 we estimate that more than 500 are in existence, with an aggregate affiliated membership running into several millions of Trade Unionists. The character of their active membership, their functions, and their proceedings have remained much as we described them thirty years ago; but they have, on the whole, increased in strength and local influence, as well as in numbers and membership. They were, as we shall presently mention, somewhat arbitrarily excluded in 1895 from the Trades Union Congress, of which they were actually the originators; and although they have since joined in various provincial federations of Trades Councils,[634] these have never acquired any great strength, and do little more than arrange for co-operation in local demonstrations. An attempt to form a National Federation of Trades Councils did not succeed. On the other hand, as we shall describe in Chapter XI., the Trades Councils were, from its establishment in 1900, admitted, equally with Trade Unions, as constituents of the Labour Representation Committee (now the Labour Party), and whether as Trades Councils, or (notably with the smaller ones) in their new form of “Trades Councils and Local Labour Parties,” they are coming slowly to form its geographical basis. It is more and more on the political side that they are in some degree succeeding in uniting the energies of the Trade Unions of a particular town. This is especially the case so far as municipal politics are concerned. They have, for instance, been the main force in securing the general adoption of the Fair Wages Clause, and in furthering the election of Labour Candidates to local governing bodies. But they are rigidly excluded from all participation in the government or trade policy of the Unions; and, so far as Trade Unionism itself is concerned, their direct influence on questions of national scope is not great. Consisting, as in the main they do, of the delegates elected by branches of national societies, they are hampered by the narrow limits of the branch autonomy. For in trade matters the branch can bring to the Council no power which it does not itself possess, whilst towards any action involving expense by the Council it can, in many Unions, contribute only the voluntary extra-subscriptions of its members. During the present century, however, many Unions have started paying from central funds the affiliation fees of their branches to Trades Councils. Down to the end of the Nineteenth Century, however, the resources of the Councils accordingly seldom sufficed for more than the hire of a room to meet in,[635] the necessary postage and stationery, and the payment of a few pounds a year for the “loss of time” of their principal officers. In no case except London does a Trades Council as such, even in 1920, pay a “full-time” salary, so as to command the whole time of a single salaried official, though the Trades Councils of cities like Glasgow, Manchester, and Bradford have salaried secretaries who have other duties; and where the Trades Council is combined with the Local Labour Party it is more and more coming to have the services of a Registration Officer or Election Agent, whose salary is usually provided as part of the election expenses of the Labour candidate.
For a long time it could hardly be said that the Trades Councils enjoyed even the moral support of the great Unions. The central executives of the national societies were apt to view with suspicion and jealousy the existence of governing bodies in which they were not directly represented. The local branches, if not actually forbidden, were not encouraged to adhere to what might conceivably become a rival authority. The strong county Unions frequently stood aloof unless they were allowed an overwhelming representation. One of the notable changes of the present century has been the diminution of this jealousy of the Trades Councils. We know of no case in which branches are now forbidden to join a Trades Council. In most cases, although permission may have to be obtained from the Executive Council or Committee, it is nowadays readily granted, and with the recognition of the need for political action, between 1901 and 1913, came positive encouragement to the branches to affiliate to the Trades Councils of their localities. [636]
It remains, however, true in 1920 as in 1890 that the Trades Councils do not include the national leaders of the Trade Union world. The salaried officials of the old-established societies seldom take part in their proceedings. The London Trades Council, for instance, the classic meeting-place of the Junta, has long since ceased to be able to count among its delegates the General Secretaries of the Engineers, Bricklayers, Railwaymen, Steel-smelters, or of any other of the great Societies having their head offices in London. The powerful coterie of cotton officials forms no part of the Manchester Trades Council. Of the boilermakers, neither the General Secretary nor any one of the nine District Delegates is usually to be found on a Trades Council. The Miners’ Agents are notorious for abstention from the Councils in their localities. This, however, is due nowadays, whatever may once have been the reason, principally to the enormous additions to the work of all the salaried officials of the Trade Union world, which make it impossible for the majority of them to attend Trades Council meetings. The Trades Councils now serve as a useful training-ground, wider than that of the Trade Union Branch, for those whom we have elsewhere described as the non-commissioned officers of the Movement, from whose ranks nearly all the Trade Union leaders emerge.
Apart from their constant activity in municipal politics, and their energetic support of the Labour Party in all elections, the Trades Councils have, in the present century, considerably increased in usefulness. They have given valuable assistance in Trade Union propaganda, alike within their own districts and in the adjacent rural districts. No small part of the increase in Trade Union membership, notably among nondescript workers in the towns, and the agricultural labourers in the country, is to be ascribed to the constant work and support of some of the more active among them. They have done much to appease quarrels among the local branches of different Unions, and they are occasionally able to intervene successfully as arbitrators.[637] Even without formal arbitration they bring warring parties together. They nominate working-class representatives to many local committees and conferences, and serve, in this way, as useful links with public administration. Some of them have, of recent years, done a great deal to promote the better education of the artisan class. They affiliate to the Workers’ Educational Association or the Labour College, and support its classes; they arrange public meetings and obtain outside speakers; they affiliate to the Labour Research Department, which has a special “Trades Councils and Local Labour Parties Section”; they subscribe to the travelling library of book-boxes maintained by the Fabian Society; they frequently issue their own monthly bulletin of Trade Union and Labour news, or journal of local government information, or at least their annual Year-Book; and they act as distributing centres for the nationally published pamphlets and leaflets—sometimes even for the more popular books on Labour questions.[638] They have come, in several centres, to form, by Joint Councils, an indispensable connecting link between the Trade Union and Co-operative Movements, and they serve, more than any other agency, as the cement between the local branches of these two movements and the Labour Party itself. To what extent they are destined, in their character of constituent members of the Labour Party, sometimes actually combined with Local Labour Parties (in the latter cases with the inclusion, since 1918, of a section of individual members, Trade Unionists or others, “workers by hand or by brain”), to develop an effective political organisation, drawing together the whole of the supporters of the Labour Party in each Parliamentary constituency, remains yet to be demonstrated.
But the most extensive federation of the Trade Union world is to-day, as it has always been, the Trades Union Congress, which could count in September 1919 an affiliated membership of more than five and a quarter millions, a number never paralleled in this or any other country. We have described in previous chapters the origin and development of this federal body, its uses in drawing together the scattered Trade Union forces, and its failure either to help in the solution of the problems of industrial organisation or to give an intellectual lead to the rank and file. [639]
We drew attention in the first edition of this book in 1894 to the weakness of the organisation of this imposing annual Congress; and, from 1895 onward, certain changes have been successively made in its constitution and procedure, not always, as we think, for the better. At the Norwich Congress in 1894 the Parliamentary Committee, which the Congress annually elects as its executive, was charged by a resolution proposed by W. J. Davis to consider the amendment of the Standing Orders, and to make the amended orders applicable to the next Congress. On the authority of this ambiguous resolution, which seems to have had in view only the establishment of Grand Committees to deal with the multiplicity of resolutions on the annual agenda, the Parliamentary Committee, of which the Chairman was then John Burns, M.P., decided forthwith to expel all the Trades Councils from the Congress, to make obligatory the “vote by card” according, not to the number of delegates, but to the aggregate membership of each Union, and to confine the delegates rigidly to the contemporary salaried officers and the members of Trade Unions actually working at their crafts—thereby excluding not only the veteran Henry Broadhurst, M.P., with John Burns himself, but also Keir Hardie, Tom Mann, and other leaders of the new movement that was seeking to make Trade Unionism a political force. Who, exactly, was responsible for this coup d’état was not officially revealed. It was said, with some authority, that James Mawdsley, the rough and forceful secretary of the Cotton-spinners, was at the bottom of the move, and that he made use of the personal rivalry between Henry Broadhurst and John Burns to get them both, and also the rebellious element from the Trades Councils, which all three disliked, excluded from future Congresses.[640] The Congress at Cardiff in 1895 was very angry, and, in effect, rebuked the Parliamentary Committee, but allowed the new Standing Orders to be confirmed on the newly adopted “card vote.” In so far as the intention was to keep the new ideas out of Congress, the result was plainly a failure, as within four years (to be described in Chapter XI.) there was a majority in Congress for the creation of the independent organisation entitled the Labour Representation Committee, which became in due course the present Labour Party. The effect was merely to weaken the intellectual influence on the Trade Union world of the Congress and its Parliamentary Committee.
With this exception of the exclusion of the Trades Councils, and of the outstanding personalities whom they occasionally sent as delegates, the visitor to the Trades Union Congress in 1919 would have found very little difference between it and the Congresses of thirty years before, except for an increase in the size of the gathering and in the number of members represented; and, as must be added, an all-round improvement in the education and manners, especially of the younger delegates. As an institution it can hardly be said to have shown, between 1890 and 1917 at least, any development at all.
It must be admitted that, with all its shortcomings, the Congress, which has now for over fifty years continued to meet annually in some industrial centre, serves many useful purposes. It is, to begin with, an outward and visible sign of that persistent sentiment of solidarity which has throughout the whole of the past century distinguished the working class. Composed of delegates from all the great national and county Unions and an increasing number of local societies, and largely attended by the salaried officials, the Congress, unlike the Trades Councils, is really representative (except for the absence of most of the political side of its organisation) of all the elements of the Trade Union world. Hence its discussions reveal, both to the Trade Union Civil Service and to party politicians, the movement of opinion among all sections of Trade Unionists, and, through them, of the great body of the wage-earners. Moreover, the week’s meeting gives a unique opportunity for friendly intercourse between the representatives of the different trades, and thus leads frequently to joint action or wider federations. Nevertheless the Congress remains, as we have described it in its early years, rather a parade of the Trade Union forces than a genuine Parliament of Labour. [641]
All the incidental circumstances tend to accentuate the parade features of Congress at the expense of its legislative capacity. The Mayor and Corporation of the city in which it is held are frequently permitted to give a public welcome to the delegates, and to hold a sumptuous reception in their honour. The Strangers’ Gallery is full of interested observers, Distinguished foreigners, representatives of Government departments, “fraternal delegates” from America and the Continent, and from the Co-operative Union and the National Union of Teachers, inquisitive politicians, and popularity-hunting ministers sit through every day’s proceedings. The press-table is crowded with reporters from all the principal newspapers of the kingdom, whilst the local organs vie with each other in bringing out special editions containing verbatim reports of each day’s discussions. But what more than anything else makes the Congress a holiday demonstration instead of a responsible deliberative assembly is its total lack of legislative power. The delegates are well aware that Congress resolutions on “subjects” have no binding effect on their constituents, and therefore do not take the trouble to put them in practicable form, or even to make them consistent one with another. From the outset the proceedings are unbusiness-like. Much of the first day is consumed in pure routine and a lengthy inaugural address from the President, who has been since 1900 always the Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee of the preceding year. The rest of the agenda consists of resolutions sent in by the various Unions and brought higgledy-piggledy before the Congress in an order determined by the chances of the ballot. These resolutions are subjected to no selection or revision beyond an attempt by subcommittees to merge in one the several proposals on each subject. The delegates have at their disposal about twenty-five hours to discuss every imaginable subject, ranging from the nationalisation of the means of production down to the prohibition of one carter driving two vehicles at a time. To enable even a minority of those present to speak for or against the proposals, each speaker is limited to five, or perhaps to three minutes, a rule which is more or less rigidly enforced. But, in spite of this vigorous application of the closure, the President is seldom able to get the business through, and has frequently as much as he can do to maintain order. The Standing Orders Committee is entirely taken up with its mechanical business, and is not authorised, any more than is the Parliamentary Committee itself, to formulate a programme for the consideration of the delegates. Nor does the Congress receive much guidance from experienced officials of the old-established Unions. Whether from a good-natured desire to let the private members have their turn at figuring in the newspapers, or from a somewhat cynical appreciation of the fruitlessness of Congress discussions, many of them habitually lie low, and seldom speak except to defend themselves against attacks. Moreover, they are busily engaged, both in and out of Congress hours, in arranging for the election of themselves or their friends on the Parliamentary Committee, which has hitherto always been governed by mutual “bargaining” for votes.[642] When the four days’ talk draws near to an end, many of the resolutions on the agenda are still undisposed of. On the Saturday morning, when most of the delegates have started for home, a thin meeting hurries rapidly through the remainder of the proposals, speeches are reduced to sixty seconds each, and the Congress adopts a score of important resolutions in a couple of hours. From first to last there is no sign of a “Front Bench” of responsible leaders. As a business meeting the whole function of the Congress is discharged in the election of the Parliamentary Committee, to which the representation of the Trade Union world for the ensuing year is entrusted.
In the first edition of this book, in 1894, we gave a description of the work of the Parliamentary Committee which it is interesting to recall:
The duties of the Parliamentary Committee have never been expressly defined by Congress, and it will easily be understood that resolutions of the kind we have described afford but little guidance for practical work. But there is a general understanding that the Committee is to watch over the political interests of its constituents, in much the same way as the Parliamentary Committee of a town council or a railway company. It is obvious that, in the case of the Trade Union world, such a mandate covers a wide field. The right of Free Association, won by Allan, Applegarth, Odger, and their allies, is now a past issue, but the Trade Union interest in legislation has, with the advance of Democracy, extended to larger and more complicated problems. The complete democratisation of the political machinery, the duty of the Government to be a model employer, the further regulation of private enterprise through perfected factory legislation, the public administration of monopolies, are all questions in which the Trade Union world of to-day considers itself keenly interested. To these distinctly labour issues must be added such interests of the non-propertied class as the incidence of taxation, the public provision for education and recreation, and the maintenance of the sick and the aged. We have here an amount of Parliamentary business far in excess of that falling upon the Parliamentary Committee of any ordinary town council or railway company. To examine all bills, public or private, introduced into Parliament that may possibly affect any of the foregoing Trade Union interests; to keep a constant watch on the administration of the public departments; to scrutinise the Budget, the Education Code, and the Orders of the Local Government Board; to bring pressure to bear on the Ministry of the day, so as to mould the Queen’s Speech into a Labour Programme; to promote independent Bills on all the subjects upon which the Government refuses to legislate; and, lastly, to organise that persistent “lobbying” of Ministers and private members which finally clinches a popular demand—all this constitutes a task which would tax the energies of half a dozen highly trained Parliamentary agents devoting their whole time to their clients. This is the work which the Trade Union Congress delegates to a committee of busy officials, all absorbed in the multifarious details of their own societies, and served only by a Secretary who is paid for a small part of his time, and who accordingly combines the office with other duties. [643]
The whole organisation is so absurdly inadequate to the task, that the Committee can hardly be blamed for giving up any attempt to keep pace with the work. The members leave their provincial headquarters fifteen or twenty times a year to spend a few hours in the little offices at 19 Buckingham Street, Strand, in deliberating upon such business as their Secretary brings before them. Preoccupied with the affairs of their societies, and unversed in general politics, they either confine their attention to the interests of their own trades, or look upon the fortnightly trip to London as a pleasant recreation from hard official duties. In the intervals between the meetings the Secretary struggles with the business as best he can, with such clerical help as he can afford to pay for out of his meagre allowance. Absorbed in his own Parliamentary duties, for the performance of which his constituents pay him a salary, he can devote to the general interests of the Trade Union world only the leavings of his time and attention. It is therefore not surprising to learn that the agenda laid before the Parliamentary Committee, instead of covering the extensive field indicated by the resolutions of the Congress, is habitually reduced to the barest minimum. The work annually accomplished by the Committee during the last few years has, in fact, been limited to a few deputations to the Government, two or three circulars to the Unions, a little consultation with friendly politicians, and the drafting of an elaborate report to Congress, describing, not their doings, but the legislation and other Parliamentary proceedings of the session. The result is that the executive committee of the United Textile Factory Workers’ Association and the Miners’ Federation exercised a far more potent influence in the lobby than the Committee representing the whole Trade Union world; whilst such expert manipulators as Mr. John Burns, Mr. Havelock Wilson, or Mr. George Howell, can point to more reforms effected in a single session than the Parliamentary Committee has lately accomplished during a whole Parliament.
It is therefore not surprising that there exists in the Trade Union world a growing feeling of irritation against the Parliamentary Committee. In each successive Congress the Committee, instead of taking the lead, finds itself placed on its defence. But it is obvious that Congress itself is to blame. The members of the Committee, including the Secretary, are men of quite as sterling character and capacity as a board of railway directors or a committee of town councillors. But whereas a railway company or a town council places at the disposal of its Parliamentary Committee the whole energies of a specially trained town clerk or solicitor, and allows him, moreover, to call to his aid as many expert advisers as he thinks fit, the Trades Union Congress expects the Parliamentary affairs of a million and a half members to be transacted by a staff inferior to that of a third-rate Trade Union. At one period, it is true, the leaders of the Trade Union world as a whole successfully conducted a long and arduous Parliamentary campaign. We have described in a previous chapter the momentous legislative revolution in the status of Trade Unionism which was effected between 1867 and 1875. But the Conference of Amalgamated Trades, and its successors the Parliamentary Committee, had in these years at their command the freely given services of such a galaxy of legal and Parliamentary talent as Mr. Frederic Harrison, Professor E. S. Beesly, Mr. Henry Crompton, Mr. Thomas (now Judge) Hughes, Messrs. Godfrey and Vernon Lushington, and Mr. (now Justice) R. S. Wright. The objection felt by the present generation of Trade Unionists to be beholden to middle-class friends is not without a certain validity. But if the Trade Union Congress wants its Parliamentary business done it must, at any rate, provide such a salary as will secure the full services of the ablest man in the movement, equip his office with an adequate number of clerks, and authorise the Parliamentary Committee to retain such expert professional assistance as may from time to time be required.
Such was the position as we saw it in 1894. The Trades Union Congress did not in any important respect improve its organisation, nor equip its Parliamentary Committee with any adequate staff. Its failure to cope with the Parliamentary business in which the Trade Union world was interested became more and more manifest; and the discontent was increased by the disinclination felt by many of the leading members of the Committee for the larger aspirations and more independent attitude in politics that marked the active spirits of the rank and file of Trade Union membership. All this co-operated to produce the vote of the 1899 Congress in favour of some definite step to increase the number of Labour Members in the House of Commons, out of which sprang the independent organisation subsequently known as the Labour Party, which we shall describe in Chapter XI. But although the Trades Union Congress thus created, at the very end of the nineteenth century, a separate political organisation for the Trade Union world, into which the steadily increasing political activity of the Trade Unions has since flowed, the Congress and its Parliamentary Committee made no change in their own work. There has accordingly continued to be the same stream, year after year, of miscellaneous resolutions before Congress, 99 per cent of them dealing with political issues, involving either legislation or a change of Government policy, resolutions which have continued to be presented and discussed without any regard to their place in any consistent programme for the Trade Union world as a whole. The Parliamentary Committee has continued to regard itself almost entirely as a Parliamentary Committee, just as if the Trade Unions had not united in a distinct political organisation and had not created their own Parliamentary Labour Party. The futile annual deputations to Ministers have continued to present to them the crude resolutions of the Trades Union Congress, without regard to the contemporary situation in the House of Commons, or the action taken by the Parliamentary Labour Party, and without taking into account in what relation they stand to the political programme of the Trade Union world as formulated, year by year, in the Conferences of the Labour Party. Meanwhile the essentially industrial work of the national organisation of Trade Unions has continued to be neglected. Both the Trades Union Congress and the Parliamentary Committee have shown the greatest disinclination to tackle such essentially Trade Union problems as those presented by the existence in the same trade of competing Trade Unions;[644] by the formation of separate Unions on overlapping and mutually inconsistent bases; by the growing rivalry between the warring conceptions of organisation by craft and organisation by industry; by the increasing failure of the membership of each branch to correspond with the staffs of the separate gigantic establishments characteristic of the present day; by the “rank and file movement,” demanding a greater direct control of workshop conditions than can easily be made compatible with the centralisation of policy in the national executives; by the development of the “Shop Stewards’” organisation; by the spread in different industries of systems of “payment by results,” unsafeguarded by the necessary adaptations of the Standard Rate and Collective Bargaining; by the tendency of the employers to make deductions from the Standard Rate when it suits them to take on individuals or new classes of workers whom they declare to be inferior, whether women or boys, old men or partially incapacitated workers of any sort; and by the introduction of “Scientific Management.” [645]
During the whole of this century, in fact, the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, and the Congress itself, have failed to grapple with the work that calls out to be done by some national organisation of the Trade Union world. After allowing to be created, on the one hand, the General Federation of Trade Unions, abandoning to it the whole function of insurance, together with the representation of British Trade Unionism in the International Federation of Trade Unions, and, on the other, the Labour Party, with its inevitable absorption of the political activity of the Trade Union world, the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress has failed to recognise, and to concentrate upon, the sphere that it had left to itself, namely, to become the national organ for the improvement and development of British Trade Unionism in its industrial aspect. Whilst the Trades Union Congress has continued anxiously and nervously to abstain from any attempt to demarcate the spheres of rival Unions or to improve their mutual relations, action which would have brought the Parliamentary Committee dangerously into conflict with one or other of its constituents, and has confined its attention as much as ever to the statutory and governmental reforms which its various sections desired, it has been progressively overshadowed, on the political side, by the rise of the Labour Party, to be described in a subsequent chapter.
Towards the end of 1919 the discontent of the Trade Union world with the position and attitude of the Parliamentary Committee came to a head. The sudden railway strike, described in this chapter, revealed the lack of any organ of co-ordination in industrial movements which inevitably affected the whole Trade Union Movement. The Parliamentary Committee itself laid before a special Trades Union Congress in December 1919 a report declaring that “the need has long been recognised for the development of more adequate machinery for the co-ordination of Labour activities, both for the movement as a whole, and especially for its industrial side. Again and again the lack of co-ordination has resulted, not only in the overlapping of administrative work, but also in unnecessary internal and other disputes, involving vast financial and moral damage to the whole Labour Movement. To do away with some of this overlapping and to provide means of co-ordinating the work of certain sections was the object with which the Triple Industrial Alliance was founded by the Miners, Railwaymen, and Transport Workers, and the same object is behind the numerous steps towards closer unity which have been taken in various industries and groups. The Negotiating Committee, hastily improvised to deal with the situation created by the railway strike this autumn, was generally felt to have fulfilled, however imperfectly, a vital need of Labour; but it is clear that it ought not to have been necessary to create a new and temporary body to do this work; the necessary machinery should have been already in existence in the form of a really effective central co-ordinating body for the movement as a whole.
“It appears to us that the body which is required should and must be developed out of the existing organisation of the Trades Union Congress and out of its closer co-operation with other sections of the working-class movement. At present, the Standing Orders do not permit the Parliamentary Committee to undertake the work which is required. Indeed, its functions, as they are now defined, are in great measure a survival from a previous period, when the chief duties of the Congress were political, and there existed no separate political organisation to express the policy and objects of Labour. We accordingly suggest that the whole functions and organisation of the Parliamentary Committee demand revision, with a view to developing out of it a real co-ordinating body for the industrial side of the whole Trade Union Movement. It is also necessary to take into account the relation of the reorganised Central Industrial Committee to the other sections of the movement, and especially to the Labour Party and to the Co-operative Movement.
“If a better central organisation could be developed both on the industrial side and by the closer joint working with the other wings of the working-class movement, a vast development of the very necessary work of publicity, information, and research would at once become possible. The research, publicity, and legal departments now working for the movement require co-ordination and extension equally with its industrial and political organisation. The research, publicity, and legal work now done by the Trades Union Congress, the Labour Party, and the Labour Research Department must be co-ordinated and greatly enlarged in close connection with the development of the executive machinery of the movement.”
The proposal did not secure the approval of the Miners’ Federation, but the special Congress, by a very large majority, passed the following resolution:
“That in view of the imperative need and demand for a central co-ordinating body representative of the whole Trade Union Movement and capable of efficiently dealing with industrial questions of national importance, the Parliamentary Committee be instructed to revise the Standing Orders of Congress in such manner as is necessary to secure the following changes in the functions and duties of the Executive body elected by Congress: