Chapter X: The Place of Trade Unionism in the State (2)

Finally, we have the argument of the Six Judges that, seeing that the sole lawful purposes of a Trade Union are “regulating the relations between workmen and masters, or between workmen and workmen, or between masters and masters,” and “imposing restrictive conditions on the conduct of any trade or business,” no action of a Parliamentary or political kind is within the definition, or even incidental to anything therein. This view, to put it bluntly, showed an ignorance of Trade Unionism, British industrial history, and the circumstances not only of 1871-76, but also of 1908-9, which was as remarkable as it was deplorable. On the face of it, to take first the words of the statute, the most usual and the most natural way of “regulating” the relations between people, and the most obvious expedient for “imposing” restrictive conditions on industry, is an Act of Parliament. It was to Acts of Parliament, as we have abundantly shown in _Industrial Democracy_, that the Trade Unions had for a century been looking, and were in 1871-76, many of them, looking, for a very large part of the “regulating” of industrial conditions, and of the “restrictive conditions” that they existed to promote. What the judges apparently forgot is that conditions of employment include not merely wages, but also hours of labour, sanitary conditions, precautions against accident, compensation for injuries, and what not. If the Six Judges had remembered how, in fact, in Great Britain the great majority of industrial relations were regulated, and how the great mass of restrictive conditions were, in fact, imposed on industry; or if they had had recalled to them the long and persistent struggle of the Trade Unions to get adopted the Factory Acts, the Mines Regulation Acts, the Truck Acts, the Shop Hours Acts, and so many more, they could hardly have argued that such actions as engaging in Parliamentary business, supporting or opposing Parliamentary candidates, and helping members of Parliament favourable to “regulating,” and “imposing restrictive conditions”--actions characteristic of Trade Unions for generations--were not incidental to these legitimate purposes. As a matter of fact, the getting and enforcing of legislation is, historically, as much a part of Trade Union function as maintaining a strike.[668] One Trade Union at least, which no one ever dreamt to be illegal, the United Textile Factory Workers’ Association, has existed exclusively for political action, and had no other functions.[669] This kind of Trade Union action is even antecedent in date to any corporate dealing with employers. During the whole two centuries of Trade Union history, as in _Industrial Democracy_ we have described, the Unions have had at their disposal, and have simultaneously adopted, three different methods of imposing and enforcing the Common Rules which they sought to get adopted in the conditions of employment. From 1700 downwards they have used the Method of Mutual Insurance; from the very beginning of the eighteenth century down to the present day the records show them to have been continuously employing the Method of Legal Enactment; whilst only intermittently during the eighteenth century, and not openly and avowedly until 1824, could they rely on the Method of Collective Bargaining. The Miners’ Unions, and the Agricultural Labourers’ Unions, in particular, had been particularly active in support of the extension of the franchise between 1863 and 1884. Even the expenditure of Trade Union funds on Parliamentary candidatures was practised by Trade Unions at any rate as early as 1868, as soon, in fact, as the town artisans were enfranchised; and the payment of Trade Union Members of Parliament was begun as early as 1874, and had lasted continuously from that date. Yet the Six Judges assumed, apparently without adequate consideration, and certainly on inaccurate information, that Parliament in 1876 intended to authorise Trade Unions to pursue their first and third methods, but intended to prohibit them, from that time forth, from using the Method of Legal Enactment, just at the moment when this latter was being most effectively employed. It is, indeed, almost comic to remember that the Bill which is supposed to have effected this revolution in the Trade Union position was brought in by Lord Cross, then Sir R. A. Cross, M.P., fresh from his election by a constituency in which the Trade Unionists had been, politically, the dominant factor; that it was debated in a House of Commons in which the direct influence of the Trade Unions was at the highest point that it had hitherto reached; that at the General Election of 1874, from which the members had lately come, the Trade Unions, as we have described in the present volume, had worked with might and main for the rejection of candidates opposed to their political claims, and had had a much larger share than political historians usually recognise in the Gladstonian defeat; that two Trade Union members were actually then sitting in the House, one, at least (Thomas Burt), being openly maintained as a salaried representative of his Union, by a salary avowedly fixed on a scale to enable him to sit in Parliament;[670] that the Conservative Government promptly introduced the particular legal enactments to obtain which the Trade Unions had spent their money, namely, the Nine Hours Bill, the Employer and Workman Bill, and the Trade Union Bill; and that the Six Judges ask us to believe that the latter Bill, which the Trade Union members themselves helped to pass, was designed and intended to prevent Thomas Burt from drawing a salary from the Northumberland Miners’ Mutual Confident Society whilst sitting in the House of Commons; to prohibit the Northumberland Miners’ Mutual Confident Society, just because it was a Trade Union, from taking any part in future elections in the Morpeth Division, and to make the action of this and all other Trade Unions in paying for political work and Parliamentary candidatures, even with the unanimous consent of their members, from that time forth illegal.

We have thought it worth while to place on record this analysis of the legally authoritative part of the Osborne Judgement, which, though partly modified by a subsequent statute, has not been overruled, and is still legally authoritative, because it is of historical importance. It is significant as showing how far the Courts of Justice were, as lately as 1909, still out of touch, so far as Trade Unionism is concerned, either with Parliament or with the political economists. The case was, however, of even greater import. The bias and prejudice, the animus and partiality--doubtless unconscious to the judges themselves--which were displayed by those who ought to have been free from such intellectual influences; the undisguised glee with which this grave miscarriage of justice was received by the governing class, and the prolonged delay of a professedly Liberal and Radical Cabinet, and a professedly Liberal and Radical House of Commons in remedying it, had a great effect on the minds of the wage-earners, and contributed notably to the increasing bitterness of feeling against the “governing class,” and against a State organisation in which such a miscarriage of justice could take place. We must, indeed, look behind the legal technicalities of the Six Judges, and consider what was the animus behind their extraordinary judgement. The “subservience” of Parliament to the Trade Unions in passing the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 had excited the deepest resentment of the lawyers. The progress of the Labour Party was causing a quite exaggerated alarm among members of the governing class. What lay behind the Osborne Judgement was a determination to exclude the influence of the workmen’s combinations from the political field. This is really what the Osborne Judgement prohibited. One irreverent legal critic, indeed, went so far as to remark that the Law Lords were so anxious to make it clear that Trade Unions were not to be entitled to pay for Members of Parliament, that they failed to heed how much law they were severally demolishing in the process! It is instructive to examine the arguments adduced by the Law Lords and the judges on this point, apart from their decision as to Trade Union status. These opinions could hardly be deemed to be law, as they all differed one from another, and none of them obtained the support of a majority of the Law Lords. Such as they are, however, they seem not to have been connected with Trade Unionism at all, but with the nature of the House of Commons. One of the Law Lords (Lord James of Hereford) merely objected to Trade Unions paying a Member of Parliament who was (as was quite incorrectly assumed) bound by a rule of the paying body requiring him to vote in a particular way, not on labour questions only, but on all issues that might come before Parliament. Another Law Lord (Lord Shaw), with whom Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton seemed to agree, held that what was illegal was not the payment of Members of Parliament, but their subjection, by whomsoever paid, to a “pledge-bound” party organisation (as the Labour Party was alleged to be). Another judge (Farwell, L.J.) took a different line, and held that it was illegal for a corporate body to require its own members to subscribe collectively towards the support of a Member of Parliament with whose views they might individually not agree. What the historian and the student of political science will say is that these were matters for legislation, not for the sudden intervention of the judiciary. The House of Commons is prompt enough to defend its own honour and its own “privilege”; and the function of the judges will begin when any of the acts referred to has been made an illegal practice. In 1909, as now, the practices complained of, whether or not they were correctly described, and however objectionable to these particular gentlemen they might be, were all lawful; and the judges and Law Lords were abusing the privileges of their office by importing them to prejudice the legal issue.

The Osborne Judgement received the support, not only of the great mass of property owners and professional men, but also, though tacitly, of the Liberal and Conservative Parties. A distinct challenge was thereby thrown down to the Trade Union world. Not only were the activities of their Unions to be crippled, not only was their freedom to combine for whatever purposes they chose to be abrogated, they were to be expressly forbidden to aspire to protect their interests or promote their objects by Parliamentary representation, or in any way to engage in politics. It was this challenge to Organised Labour that absorbed the whole interest of the Trade Union world for the next three or four years.

The experienced Trade Union leaders did not forget that it might well be a matter for Trade Union consideration how far it is wise and prudent for a Trade Union to engage in general politics. We have elsewhere pointed out[671] with some elaboration how dangerous it may become to the strength and authority of a Trade Union if any large section of the persons in the trade are driven out of its ranks, or deterred from joining, because they find their convictions outraged by part of its action. Nothing could be more unwise for a Trade Union than to offend its Roman Catholic members by espousing the cause of secular education.[672] But this is a point which each Trade Union must decide for itself. It is not a matter in which outsiders can offer more than counsel. It is clearly not a matter in which the discretion of the Trade Union, any more than that of an individual employer, can properly be limited by law. For no Trade Union can nowadays abstain altogether from political action. Without co-operating with other Trade Unions in taking Parliamentary action of a very energetic and very watchful kind, it cannot (as long experience has demonstrated to practically all Trade Unionists) protect the interests of its members. Without taking a vigorous part in promoting, enforcing, and resisting all sorts of legislation affecting education, sanitation, the Poor Law, the whole range of the Factories, Mines, Railways, and Merchant Shipping Acts, the Shop Hours, Truck, Industrial Arbitration and Conciliation, and now even the Trade Boards’ Act, the Trade Union cannot properly fulfil its function of looking after the regulation of the conditions of employment. But this is not all. The interests of its members require the most watchful scrutiny of the administration of every public department. There is not a day passes but something in Parliament demands its attention. On this point Trade Union opinion is unanimous. We have never met any member of a Trade Union--and Osborne himself is no exception--who has any contrary view. To suggest that there is anything improper, or against public policy, for a Trade Union to give an annual retaining fee to a Member of Parliament whom its members trust, or to take the necessary steps to get that member elected, in order to ensure that what the Trade Union conceives to be its own interests shall be protected, was to take up a position of extraordinary unfairness. When more than a quarter of the whole House of Commons habitually consists, not merely of individual employers, but actually of persons drawing salaries or stipends from capitalist corporations of one kind or another--when, in fact, the number of companies of shareholders in railways, banks, insurance companies, breweries, ocean telegraphs, shipbuilding yards, shipping companies, steamship lines, iron and steel works, coal mines, and joint stock enterprises of all sorts actually represented in the House of Commons by their own salaried chairmen, directors, trustees, managers, secretaries, or solicitors is beyond all computation--the claim that there is something improper, something inconsistent with our electoral system, something at variance with the honourable nature of the House of Commons, for the workmen’s organisations to retain a few dozen of the Members whom the constituencies (knowing of this payment) deliberately elect, or to help such Members to provide their election expenses, is an argument so extraordinary in its unfairness that it drives the active-minded workman frantic with rage. It is no answer to say that these representatives of capitalist corporations are not expressly paid to sit in Parliament. They are at any rate desired by their employers to sit, and permitted by the law to receive their salaries notwithstanding that they do sit. This was forbidden to representatives of Trade Unions. That it should be illegal for the salaried President or Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants to sit in Parliament, when it is perfectly legal for the much more generously salaried Chairman or Director of a Railway Company to sit there, is an anomaly hard for any candid man to defend; and the anomaly is all the greater in that the interests of the railway company come, almost every year, into conflict with those of the community at large, and the railway chairman is, on these occasions, quite frankly there to promote his own company’s Bill, and to defend the interests of the shareholders by whom he is paid. To say that the workmen’s organisations shall not pay their representatives in the way that suits working-class conditions, whilst railway shareholders may pay their representatives in the way that suits capitalist conditions--to assume a great concern for the wounded conscience of a Liberal or Conservative Trade Unionist who finds his Union paying its Secretary or its President to sit as a Radical or Labour Member of Parliament, and no concern at all for the Socialist or Radical shareholder in a railway company who finds his company paying its Conservative Chairman M.P.--is to be guilty of an amazing degree of class bias, if not of hypocrisy. After all, it is not the Trade Union but the constituency that elects the Member of Parliament. The Trade Union payment only enables him to stand. Whatever may be thought of the policy of the Labour Party, or the particular form of its organisation, if we regard the Trade Union payment as a retaining fee for looking after what the Trade Union members as a whole conceive to be their own interest; if the Trade Union members have the opportunity of choosing, by a majority, which among competing persons (or, for that matter, which among competing groups of persons) they will entrust with this Trade Union task; if the Trade Union assumes no responsibility for and exercises no coercion upon its Parliamentary representative with regard to issues on which it has not voted, no Trade Unionist’s political conscience need be wounded by the fact that, outside the range of the task that the Trade Union has confided to him, the Union’s Parliamentary agent (who must have views of one sort or another) expresses opinions in accord with those of the constituency that elected him, or joins together with other members of like opinions to form a political party. When, three-quarters of a century ago, J. A. Roebuck was the salaried agent in the House of Commons for the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, no one complained that it was against the dignity of Parliament for him to be thus retained and paid; and so long as he attended faithfully to Canadian business it was never contended that the tender conscience of any Canadian Conservative was offended by the ultra-Radical utterances or extremely independent political alliances of the Member for Bath.

THE TRADE UNION ACT OF 1913

It is an instance of the failure of both the governing class and the party politicians to appreciate the workman’s standpoint, or to understand the temper of the Trade Union world, that this crippling judgement remained for nearly four years unreversed. The Liberal and Conservative Parties were, during 1910 and 1911, quarrelling about the Budget and the exact powers to be exercised by the House of Lords; and two successive General Elections were fought without bringing the Trade Unions any redress. Meanwhile, up and down the country discontented or venal Trade Unionists were sought out by solicitors and others acting for the employers; and were induced to lend their names to proceedings for injunctions against their own Unions, prohibiting them from subscribing to the Labour Party, from contributing towards the election expenses of candidates, from taking action in municipal elections, from subscribing to educational classes, and from taking shares in a “Labour” newspaper. It may have seemed a skilful political dodge, during the elections of 1910, to hamstring in this way the growing Labour Party; but the resentment caused by such behaviour makes it doubtful whether action of this kind is, in the long run, politically advantageous. In the first place, the House of Commons, in 1911, felt itself compelled, as an alternative to restoring Trade Union liberties, to concede the payment of £400 a year to all Members of Parliament. Finally, in 1913, the Cabinet, after a severe internal struggle, brought itself to introduce a Bill giving power generally to any Trade Union to include in its constitution any lawful purpose whatever, so long as its principal objects were those of a Trade Union as defined in the 1876 Act; and to spend money on any purpose thus authorised. It was, indeed, provided that before the financing of certain specified political objects could be undertaken, including the support of Parliamentary or Municipal candidates or members, or the publication or distribution of political documents,[673] a ballot of the members was to be held in a prescribed form, and a simple majority of those voting secured; the payments were to be made out of a special political fund, and any member was to be entitled to claim to be exempt from the special subscription to that political fund. These restrictive provisions were opposed by the Labour Members in the House of Commons; but with slight amendment the measure was passed into law as the Trade Union Act of 1913.[674]

It is not easy to sum up the whole effect of the legal assaults upon Trade Unionism between 1901 and 1913. Politically, the result was to exasperate the active-minded workmen, and greatly to promote, though with some delay, the growth of an independent Labour Party in the House of Commons. On the other hand, it must not be overlooked that the temporary crippling of Trade Unionism seemed to be of financial advantage to that generation of employers. It was, perhaps, not altogether an accident that the brunt of the attack had to be borne by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, a Union then struggling for “recognition” in such a position as to make effective its claims to better remuneration and shorter hours of labour for the whole body of railwaymen. It may fairly be reckoned that the railwaymen were, by means of the two great pieces of litigation to which their Union was subjected, held at bay for something like a decade, during which the improvement in their conditions, in spite of a slowly-increasing cost of living, was (mainly through the evasions of the railway companies by their silent “regrading” of their staffs) extremely small.[675] A rise of wages to the extent of only a penny per hour for the whole body of railwaymen would have cost the railway companies, in the aggregate, something like five or six million pounds a year. If any such advance was, by means of the Taff Vale Case and the Osborne Judgement, staved off for ten years, the gain to the whole body of railway shareholders of that generation might be put as high as fifty or sixty millions sterling--a sum worth taking a little trouble about and spending a little money upon, in items not revealed in the published accounts. But the crippling effect of the litigation was not confined to the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, which spent, altogether, nearly £50,000 in law costs in defending the pass for the whole Trade Union Movement. If, in the temporary set-back to trade in 1903-5, and in the revival that immediately followed it; or in the recurring set-back of 1908-9, and the great improvement of the ensuing years, the whole body of wage-earners in the kingdom lost only a penny per hour from their wages, or gained less than they might otherwise have done to the extent of no more than a penny per hour, their financial loss, in one year alone, would have amounted to something like a hundred million pounds. And whatever they forwent in this way, they lost not during one year only, but during at least several years, and many of them for a whole decade. There is no doubt that the capitalist employers, thinking only of their profits for the time being, regarded even a temporary crippling of the Trade Union Movement as well worth all that it might cost them. The historian, thinking more of the secular effort upon social institutions, will not find the balance-sheet so easy to construct. The final result of the successive attempts between 1901 and 1913 to cripple Trade Unionism by legal proceedings was to give it the firmest possible basis in statute law. The right of workmen to combine for any purpose not in itself unlawful was definitely established. The strike, with its “restraint of trade,” and its interference with profits and business; peaceful picketing even on an extensive scale; the persuasion of workmen to withdraw from employment even in breach of contract, and the other frequent incidents of an industrial dispute were specifically declared to be, not only not criminal, but actually lawful. The right of Trade Unions to undertake whatever political and other activities their members might desire was expressly conceded. Finally, a complete immunity of Trade Unions in their corporate capacity from being sued or made answerable in damages, for any act whatsoever, however great might be the damage thereby caused to other parties, was established by statute in the most absolute form.[676] The Trade Unions, it must be remembered, had not asked for these sweeping changes in their position. They had been, in 1900, content with the legislation of 1871-76. It was the successive assaults made upon them by the legal proceedings of 1901-13 that eventually drove the Government and Parliament, rather than formally concede to Trade Unionism its proper position in the government of industry, and effect the necessary fundamental amendment of the law, once more to create for the workmen’s organisations an anomalous status.

THE RISE IN STATUS OF TRADE UNIONISM

So far we have described only the changes in the legal status of the Trade Unions and the consequent increase in their freedom of action and in their influence, alike in the industrial and political sphere. This advance in legal status has been accompanied by a still more revolutionary transformation of the social and political standing of the official representatives of the Trade Union world--a transformation which has been immensely accelerated by the Great War. We may, in fact, not unfairly say that Trade Unionism has, in 1920, won its recognition by Parliament and the Government, by law and by custom, as a separate element in the community, entitled to distinct recognition as part of the social machinery of the State, its members being thus allowed to give--like the clergy in Convocation--not only their votes as citizens, but also their concurrence as an order or estate.

Like all revolutionary changes in the British constitution, the recognition of the Trade Union Movement as part of the governmental structure of the nation began in an almost imperceptible way. Though Trade Union leaders had been, since 1869, appointed occasionally and sparsely on Royal Commissions and Departmental Committees, it was possible, as recently as 1903, for a Government to set up a Royal Commission on Trade Disputes and Trade Combinations without a single Trade Unionist member. Such a thing has not been repeated. It is now taken for granted that Trade Unionism must be distinctively and effectually represented, usually by men or women of its own informal nomination, on all Royal Commissions and Departmental Committees, whether or not these inquiries are concerned specifically with “Labour Questions”--excepting only such as are so exclusively financial or professional that the representatives of Labour do not seek or desire representation upon them.

In 1885-86, and again in 1892-95, Liberal Prime Ministers had appointed leading Trade Unionists (who were, it must be noted, also Liberal M.P.’s) to subordinate Ministerial positions, where they were permitted practically no influence.[677] In 1905 Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman startled some of his Whig associates by asking Mr. John Burns--who had presided over the Trades Union Congress as a representative of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, but who had sat in Parliament since 1892 as a Liberal supporter--to join his Cabinet as President of the Local Government Board. This recognition of Labour in the inner councils of the Government was quickly followed by an explicit recognition of the Trade Unions as part of the machinery of State administration. In 1911, when the vast scheme of National Insurance was brought forward by Mr. Asquith’s Government, and Parliament sanctioned the raising and expenditure of more than twenty million pounds a year for the relief of sickness and unemployment, the Trade Unions, equally with the universally praised Friendly Societies, were made the agents for the administration of the sickness, invalidity, and maternity benefits, and, parallel with the Government’s own local organisation, and to the exclusion of the Friendly Societies, also for the administration of the State Unemployment Benefit to their own members. But it was during the Great War that we watch the most extensive advance in the status, alike of the official representatives of the Trade Unions and of the Trade Unions themselves, as organs of representation and government. It is needless to say that this recognition was not accorded to the Trade Union world without a _quid pro quo_ from the Trade Union Movement to the Government. Hence the part played by the Trade Unions in the national effort, and its effect on their influence and status, demands explicit notice.

BRITISH TRADE UNIONISM AND THE WAR

Though theoretically internationalist in sympathy, and predominantly opposed to “militarism” at home as well as abroad, British Trade Unionism, when war was declared, took a decided line.[678] From first to last the whole strength of the Movement--in spite of the pacifist faith of a relatively small minority, which included the most fervent and eloquent of the Labour members and was supported by the energetic propaganda of the fraction of the Trade Unionists who were also members of the Socialist Society known as the I.L.P.--was thrown on the side of the nation’s effort. From every industry workmen flocked to the colours, with the utmost encouragement and assistance from their Trade Unions; until the miners, the railwaymen, and the engineers, in particular, had to be refused as recruits, exempted from conscription, and even returned from the army, in order that the indispensable industrial services might be maintained. The number of workers in engineering and the manufacture of munitions of war had, indeed, to be largely increased; and the Government found itself, within a year, under the necessity of asking the Trade Unions for the unprecedented sacrifice of the relinquishment, for the duration of the war, of the entire network of “Trade Union Conditions” which had been slowly built up by generations of effort for the protection of the workmen’s Standard of Life. This enormous draft on the patriotism of the rank and file could only be secured by enlisting the support of the official representatives of the Trade Union world--by according to them a unique and unprecedented place as the diplomatic representatives of the wage-earning class. In the famous Treasury Conference of February 1915 the capitalist employers were ignored, and the principal Ministers of the Crown negotiated directly with the authorised representatives of the whole Trade Union world, not only in respect of the terms of service of Government employees, but also with regard to the conditions of employment of all persons, men and women, skilled and unskilled, unionists and non-unionists, engaged on any work needed for the conduct of the war--a phrase which was afterwards stretched to include four-fifths of the entire manual-working class. The Trade Union Executives agreed, at this Conference or subsequently, to suspend, for the duration of the war, all their rules and customary practices restrictive of the output of anything required by the Government for the conduct of the war; all limitation of employment to apprenticed men, to Trade Unionists, to men of proved technical skill, to adults and even to the male sex; all reservation of particular jobs or particular machines to workers of particular trades; all definition of a Normal Day, and all objection to overtime, night-work, or Sunday duty; and even many of the Factory Act prohibitions by which the health and even the safety of the operatives had been protected. In order that the utmost possible output of munitions of every kind might be secured, elaborate schemes of “dilution” were assented to, under which the various tasks were subdivided and rearranged, a very large amount of automatic machinery was introduced, and successive drafts of “dilutees” were brought into the factories and workshops--men and boys from other occupations, sometimes even non-manual workers, as well as women and girls--and put to work under the tuition and direction of the minority of skilled craftsmen at top speed, at time wages differing entirely from the Trade Union rates, or at piecework prices unsafeguarded by Collective Bargaining, for hours of labour indefinitely lengthened, sometimes under conditions such as no Trade Union would have permitted. It must be recorded to the credit of the Trade Unions that not one of the societies refused this sacrifice, which was made without any demand for compensatory increase of pay, merely upon the condition--to which not only the Ministry, but also the Opposition Leaders and the House of Commons as a whole, elaborately and repeatedly pledged themselves--that the abandonment of the “Trade Union Conditions” was only to be for the duration of the war, and exclusively for the service of the Government, not to the profit of any private employer; and that everything that was abrogated was to be reinstated when peace came.

Under stress of the national emergency, the Government made ever greater demands on the patriotism of the Trade Unions, which accepted successively, so far as war-work was concerned, a legal abrogation of the employers’ competition for their members’ services by the prohibition of advertisement for employees, and of the engagement of men from other districts--an unprecedented interference with the “Law of Supply and Demand”--the suspension of the right to strike for better terms; the submission of all disputes to the decision of a Government Department of arbitration, the awards of which, with the abrogation of the right to strike, or even freely to relinquish employment, became virtually compulsory; the legal enforcement under penalties of the employer’s workshop rules; and even legally enforced continuance, not only in munition work, but actually in the service of a particular employer, under the penal jurisdiction of the ubiquitous Munitions Tribunals. The Munitions of War Acts, 1915, 1916 and 1917, by which all this industrial coercion was statutorily imposed, were accepted by overwhelming majorities at successive Trade Union and Labour Party Conferences. It was a serious aggravation of this “involuntary servitude” that the rigid enforcement of compulsory military service--extended successively from single men to fathers of families, from 18 years of age to 51--had the incidental effect of enforcing what was virtually “industrial conscription” on those who were left for the indispensable civilian employment; and the individual workman realised that the penalty for any failure of implicit obedience to the foreman might be instant relegation to the trenches. Although this inevitable result of Compulsory Military Service was foreseen and deplored,[679] the successive Military Service Acts were--in view of the nation’s needs--ratified, in effect, by great majorities at the workmen’s National Congresses. The strongest protests were made, but as each measure was passed it was accepted without resistance, and proposals to resist were always rejected by large majorities. It speaks volumes, both for the patriotism of the Trade Unionists and for the strength of Trade Union loyalty and Trade Union organisation, that under such repressive circumstances the Trade Union leaders were able, on the whole, to prevent their members from hindering production by industrial revolts. A certain amount of friction was, of course, not to be avoided. Strikes, though greatly reduced in number, were not wholly prevented; and the South Wales coal-miners and the engineering workmen on the Clyde--largely through arbitrary and repressive action by their respective employers--broke into open rebellion; which led, in the one industry, to the Government overriding the recalcitrant South Wales employers and assuming the direction and the financial responsibility of all the coal mines throughout the kingdom; and, in the other, to the arbitrary arrest and deportation of the leaders of the unofficial organisation of revolt styled the “Clyde Workers’ Committee.” The Trade Union Executives and officials, whilst restraining their members and deprecating all stoppages of production, were able to put up a good fight against the unnecessary and unreasonable demands which, with a view to “after the war” conditions, employers were not unwilling to use the national emergency to put forward. These Trade Union spokesmen had to obtain for their members the successive rises in money wages which the steadily rising cost of living made necessary, and they had constantly to stand their ground in the innumerable mixed committees and arbitration proceedings into which the Government was always inveigling them. On the whole, whilst co-operating in every way in meeting the national emergency, the Trade Union organisation during the four and a-quarter years of war remained intact; and Trade Union membership--allowing for the millions absent with the colours--steadily increased. Nor did the Trade Union Movement make any serious revolt when the Government found itself unable to fulfil, with any literal exactness, the specific pledges which it had given to Organised Labour. The complications and difficulties of the Government were, in fact, so great that the pledges were not kept. The first promise to be broken was that the abrogation of Trade Union Conditions and the removal of everything restrictive of output should not be allowed to increase the profits of the employers. The so-called “Munitions Levy” was imposed in 1916 on “controlled establishments,” in fulfilment of this pledge, in order to confiscate for the Exchequer the whole of their excess profit, over and above a permitted addition of 20 per cent and very liberal allowances for increased capital and extra exertion by the employers themselves. It will hardly be believed that, in flagrant disregard of the specific pledge, within a year this Munitions Levy was abolished; and the firms especially benefiting by the workmen’s sacrifices were made merely subject, in common with all other trades where there had been no such abrogation of Trade Union Conditions, to the 80 per cent Excess Profits Duty, with the result of increasing the net income left to those employers whose profits had doubled, and of doing, with regard to all the employers, the very thing that the Trade Unions had stipulated should not be done, namely, giving the employers themselves a financial interest in “dilution.”[680] As the war dragged on, and prices rose, the successive war-bonuses and additions to wages--especially those of the miners and the bulk of the women workers--in many cases fell steadily behind the rise in the cost of living; and in 1917 the War Cabinet was actually guilty of a formal instruction to the presumedly impartial central arbitration tribunal that no further increase of wages was to be awarded--an instruction which, on its public disclosure, had to be apologised for and virtually withdrawn. Even the pledge as to wages in the solemn “Treasury Agreement” of 1915, at which the “Trade Union Conditions” were surrendered, was not fulfilled, at any rate as regards the women workers; and had to be made the subject of a subsequent serious investigation by the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry, in which all the “white-washing” of a Government majority failed to convince the Trade Unionists, any more than it did the only unpaid member of the Committee, that the Government officials had not betrayed them.[681] The solemnly promised “Restoration of Trade Union Conditions” was only imperfectly carried out. What the Government did, and that only after long delay, was not what it had promised, namely, actually to see the pre-war conditions and practices reinstated, but to enact a statute enabling the workmen to proceed in the law courts against employers who failed to restore them; continuance of any such restoration to be obligatory only for one year.[682]

The Trade Unionists, in fact, who had at the outset of the war patriotically refrained from bargaining as to the price of their aid, were, on the whole, “done” at its close. Though here and there particular sections had received exceptionally high earnings in the time of stress, the rates of wages, taking industry as a whole, did not, as the Government returns prove, rise either so quickly or so high as the cost of living; so that, whilst many persons suffered great hardship, the great majority of wage-earners found the product in commodities of their rates of pay in 1919 less rather than more than it was in 1913. During the war, indeed, many thousands of households got in the aggregate more, and both earned and needed more; because the young and the aged were at work and costing more than when not at work, whilst overtime and night-work increased the strain and the requirements of all. When peace came, it was found that the Government, for all its promises, had made no arrangements whatever to prevent unemployment; and none to relieve the unemployed beyond an entirely improvised and dwindling weekly dole, which (so far as civilians were concerned) was suddenly brought to an end on November 20, 1919, without any alternative provision being immediately made.

It would thus be easy to argue that the representatives of the Trade Union world made a series of bad bargains with the Government, and through the Government with the capitalist employers, at a time when the nation’s needs would have enabled the organised manual workers almost to dictate their own terms. But this is to take a short-sighted view. It is a sufficient answer to say that the great mass of the Trade Unionists, like the leaders themselves, wanted above all things that the nation should win the war; found it repugnant to make stipulations in the national emergency, and did not realise the extent to which they were being tricked and cheated by the officials. But apart from this impulsive and unself-regarding patriotism we think that, when it becomes possible to cast up and balance all the results of the innovations of the war period, the Trade Union Movement will be found to have gained and not lost. We may suggest, perhaps paradoxically, that the very ease with which the War Cabinet suppressed the civil liberties of the manual-working wage-earners during the war, and even continued after the Armistice a machinery of industrial _espionage_, with _agents provocateurs_ of workshop “sedition,” enormously increased the solidarity of the Trade Union Movement--an effect intensified during 1919 by the costly and futile intervention of the British Government in Russia on behalf of military leaders whom the Trade Unionists, rightly or wrongly, believed to be organising the forces of political and economic reaction. Sober and responsible Trade Unionists, who had taken for granted the easy-going freedom and tolerance characteristic of English life in times of peace, suddenly realised that these conditions could at any moment be withdrawn from them by what seemed the arbitrary fiat of a Government over which they found that they had no control. In this way the abrogation of Trade Union liberty during the war gave the same sort of intellectual fillip to Trade Unionism and the Labour Party in 1915-19 that had been given in 1901-13 by the Taff Vale Case and the Osborne Judgement. At the same time the Government found itself compelled, in order to secure the co-operation of the Trade Unions, both during the war and amid the menacing economic conditions of the first half of 1919, to accord to them, and to their leaders, a _locus standi_ in the determination of essentially national issues that was undreamt of in previous times. The Trade Unions, in fact, through shouldering their responsibility in the national cause, gained enormously in social and political status. In practically every branch of public administration, from unimportant local committees up to the Cabinet itself, we find the Trade Union world now accepted as forming, virtually, a separate constituency, which has to be specially represented. We shall tell the tale in our next chapter of the participation of members of the Parliamentary Labour Party in the Coalition Governments of Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George. What is here relevant is that these Trade Union officials were selected in the main, not on personal grounds, but because they represented the Trade Union Movement. They accepted ministerial office with the approval, and they relinquished ministerial office at the request of the National Conference of the Labour Party, in which the Trade Unions exercised the predominant influence. A similar recognition of the Trade Union Movement has marked all the recently constituted Local Government structure, from the committees set up in 1914 for the relief of distress to those organised in 1917 for the rationing and control of the food supply, and the tribunals formed in 1919 for the suppression of “profiteering.” In all these cases the Government specifically required the appointment of representatives of the local Trade Unions. Trade Unionists have to constitute half the members appointed to the Advisory Committees attached to the Employment Exchanges; and Trade Unionist workmen sit, not only on the temporary “Munitions Courts” administering the disciplinary provisions of the Munitions of War Acts, but also on the local Tribunals of Appeal to determine whether a workman is entitled to the State Unemployment Benefit. In the administration of the Military and Naval Pensions Act of 1916 a further step in recognition of Trade Unionism was taken. Not only were the nominees of Labour placed upon the Statutory (Central) Pensions Committee, but, in the order constituting the Local Pensions Committees, the Trade Union organisations in each locality, which were named in the schemes, were expressly and specifically accorded the right to elect whom they chose as their representatives on these committees by which the pensions were to be awarded.[683] When, towards the close of the war, the Committee presided over by the Rt. Hon. J. H. Whitley, M.P., propounded its scheme of Joint Industrial Councils of equal numbers of representative employers and workers for the supervision and eventual administration of many matters of interest in each industry throughout the kingdom--the “mouse” which was practically the whole outcome as regards industrial reorganisation of the Ministry of Reconstruction--it was specifically to the Trade Unions in each industry, and to them alone, that the election of the wage-earners’ representatives was entrusted.[684] When, in 1919, it seemed desirable to make a series of comprehensive reforms in the terms of employment, it was not to Parliament that the Prime Minister turned, but to a “National Industrial Conference,” to which he summoned some five hundred representatives of the Employers’ Associations and Trade Unions. It was by this body, through its own sub-committee of thirty employers’ representatives and thirty Trade Union representatives, that were elaborated the measures instituting a Legal Maximum Eight Hours Day and a statutory Minimum Wage Commission that the Ministry undertook to present to Parliament. In the Royal Commission on Agriculture of 1919, the several Unions enrolling farm labourers were invited to nominate as many members (eight) as were accorded to the farmers, whilst of the four remaining members appointed as scientific or statistical experts--all landlords being excluded--two were chosen among those known to be sympathetic to Labour. In the statutory Coal Industry Commission of the same year, to which reference has already been made, the Miners’ Federation made its participation absolutely conditional on being allowed to nominate half of the total membership, under a presumedly impartial Judge of the High Court, including not merely three Trade Union officials to balance the three mine-owners, but also three out of the six “disinterested” members by whom--all royalty owners being excluded--the Commission was to be completed. All this constitutional development is at once the recognition and the result of the new position in the State that Trade Unionism has won--a position due not merely to the numerical growth that we have described, but also to the uprise of new ideas and wider aspirations in the Trade Union world itself.

THE REVOLUTION IN THOUGHT

The new ideas which are to-day taking root in the Trade Union world centre round the aspiration of the organisations of manual workers to take part--some would urge the predominant part, a few might say the sole part--in the control and direction of the industries in which they gain their livelihood. Such a claim was made, as we have described in the third chapter of this work, in its most extreme form, by the revolutionary Trade Unionism of 1830-34; and it lingered on in the minds of the Chartists as long as any of them survived. But after the collapse, in 1848, of Chartism as an organised movement British Trade Unionism settled down to the attainment of a strictly limited end--the maintenance and progressive improvement, within each separate occupation or craft, of the terms of the bargain made by the wage-earner with the employers, including alike all the conditions of service and complete freedom from personal oppression. Hence the Trade Unionist as such, during the second half of the nineteenth century, tacitly accepted the existing organisation of industry. He discussed the rival advantages of private enterprise carried on in the interests of the capitalist profit-maker on the one hand, and of the Consumers’ Co-operative Movement or State and Municipal enterprise on the other, almost exclusively from the standpoint of whether the profit-making employers or the representatives of the consumers or the citizens offered better conditions of employment to the members of his own organisation. Right down to the end of the nineteenth century this remained the dominant working-class view. We find in the proceedings of the Royal Commission on Labour, 1891-94, a striking demonstration of the strictly limited purpose of British Trade Unionism at that date. Whether we study the elaborate collection of Trade Union rules and other documents made by the Commission, or the personal evidence given by the leaders or advocates of Trade Unionism, we find from beginning to end absolutely no claim, and even no suggestion, that the Trade Union should participate in the direction of industry, otherwise than in arranging with the employers the conditions of the wage-earner’s working life.[685] One or two Unions included, among their published “objects,” vague and pious references to the desirability of co-operative production; but the assumption was always that any such co-operative production would be carried out by the members of the Union working in and managing a particular establishment, which would take its place, like any private establishment, within the framework of the capitalist system. When a Trade Union leader was also a Socialist he assumed that the “Socialisation” of industry would be carried out by the Central or Local Government, or by the Consumers’ Co-operative Movement. Hence, Mr. Tom Mann, himself a Royal Commissioner, who was called as a witness before the Commission, was a powerful advocate of nationalisation and municipalisation. “I am distinctly favourable, and am associated with those who are earnestly advocating,” he stated from the witness-chair, “the advisability of encouraging the State to at once entertain the proposal of the State control of railways. I am also identified with those who are favourable to the nationalisation of the land, which means, of course, a State control of land in the common interest; and I am continually advocating the desirability for statesmen and politicians and municipal councillors to try and understand in what particular departments of industry they can get to work and exercise their faculties in controlling trade and industry in the common interest where that interest would be likely to be secured better than under the present method.” When asked by the Duke of Devonshire whether his advocacy of the nationalisation of the railways was in the interests of the public or mainly in the interests of the workmen employed on the railways, he replied: “Not mainly on behalf of the workers; I would put it equally so. I believe it would serve the public interest, the general well-being of the community.... I do not believe that a Government Department will ever be healthy until the public themselves are healthy in this direction, and are keeping a watchful eye upon the whole governmental show and secure the general well-being by their watchfulness. I do not think that State control of industry will ever be brought about until that development on the part of the public themselves is brought about, and they desire to see it controlled in the common interest.... When a sufficient number of men are prepared to take the initiative, and educate public opinion to the desirability of a superior method of control in the common interest, then I believe it will be done, not all at once, but gradually.”[686]

But Mr. Tom Mann did not stand alone. The Independent Labour Party, the largest and the most popular of Socialist societies in the United Kingdom, established in 1893, and largely recruited from the ranks of Trade Unionists, carried on, right down to the outbreak of the Great War, a vigorous propaganda in favour of an indefinite extension of State and Municipal administration of industrial undertakings, whilst the more doctrinaire Social Democratic Federation was, in its early days, outspokenly contemptuous of the whole Trade Union Movement as a mere “palliative” of the Capitalist system. This bias in favour of the communal organisation, in favour of the government of the people by and for the people organised in geographical areas, was, until the opening of the twentieth century, equally dominant among the most “advanced” Labour and Socialist thinkers on the Continent of Europe.[687]