time-honored lathe, includes a be- wildering variety of drilling, shaping, boring, planing, slotting, milling, and other machines, attended by wholly new classes of machine-minders and tool-makers, displaying every grade of skill. Finally, we have such new kinds of work, with new classes of specialists, as are involved in the innumerable applications of iron and steel in modern civilisation, such as iron ships and bridges, ordnance and armour-plating, hydraulfc apparatus and electric-lighting, sewing-machines and bicycles. ■To discover the exact limits of a " trade " in these closely related but varied occupations is a task of supreme difficulty. All are working in the s^me industry, and in the large establishments of to-day, all may be engaged by a single employer. The same recurring waves of expansion and , contraction sooner or later affect all alike. On the other hand, there exist between the separate occupations great varieties of methods of remuneration, standard earnings, and strategic position. The strictly - apprenticed boilermakers (shipyard platers) working in compact groups, at co-operative piecework, earning sometimes as much as a pound a day, find it advantageous in good times to roll up, by large sub- scriptions, a huge reserve fund, to maintain a staff of special trade officers to arrange their piecework prices at every port, and to provide handsomely for their recurring periods of trade depression. At the other end of the scale we have the intelligent laborer become an automatic machine-minder, securing relative continuity of low-paid employment by working any simple machine in , any kind of engineering establishment, and interested mainly in the opening of every
Interunion Relations 109
operation to the quickwitted outsider. The pattern-maker again, working in wood, at a high time rate, has little in common with the piece-working smith at the forge. When trade begins to improve, the pattern-makers, followed by the ironfounders, will be busy long before the smiths, fitters, and turners, and, if they wish to recover the wages lost in the previous depression, must move for an advance whilst all the rest of the engineering industry is still on short time. Finally, t here is the difficulty of the method and basis of repres entation. Shall the government be centred in an trnn shipbuilding port, where the boilermakers would be supreme, or in an inland engineering centre, when the fitters and turners would have an equally great preponderance ? How can the tiny groups of pattern-makers, dispersed over the whole kingdom, get their separate interests attended to amid the overwhelming majorities of the other classes ? Any attempt to represent, upon an executive council, each dis- tinct occupation, let alone each great centre, must either' ignore all proportional considerations, or involve the forma- tion of a body of impossible dimensions and costliness.
We se e, therefore, that within the circle of what is usuallyf called a trade, there are often smaller circles of specialised! classes of workmen, each sufficiently distinctive in character to claim separate consideration. The first idea is always to cut the Gordian knot by ignoring these differences, and making the larger circle the unit of government. So fas-_ cinating is this idea of f amalgamation '| that it has been tried in almost every industry. The reader of the History} of Trade Unionism will remember the remarkable attempt - in 1 83 3–34 to form a national "Builders' Union," to com- prise the seven different branches of building operatives. 1 The s^me years saw a succession of general unions in the cloth-making industry. In 1844, and again in 1863, the coalminers sought to combine in qne amalgamated union every person employed in or about thie mines, from one end*' of the kingdom to the other. The " Iron Trades " again" were, between 1840 and 1850, the subject of innumerable!
no Trade Union Structure
local projects of amalgamaticin, in which not only the " Five Trades of Mechanism," but also the Boilermakers and the Ironfounders were all to be included. We need not describe the failure of all these attempts. More can, perhaps, be learnt from the experience of the great modern instance, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers.
It does not seem to have occurred to William Newton,, when he launched this famous amalgamation, that any diffi- culty could arise as to the classes of workers to be included. What he was primarily concerned about was to merge in one national organisation all the various local societies of engineering mechanics, whether pattern-makers,smiths, turners, fitters, or erectors, working either in iron or brass. But " sectionalism " stood, from the very first, in the way. The various local clubs of Smiths and Pattern-makers objected strongly to sink their individuality in a general engineers' union. In the same way, the more exclusive Steam-Engine Makers' Society, in which millwrights, fitters, and turners predominated, refused to merge itself in the wider organisa- tion. To Newton and Allan all these objections seemed to arise from the natural reluctance of local clubs to lose their individuality in a national union. This dislike, as they rightly felt, was destined to give way before the superior advantages of national combination. But subsequent ex- perience has shown that the resistance to the amalgamation was due to more permanent causes. The "merely local societies dropped in, one by one, to their greater rival. But this only revealed a more serious cleavage. The present rivals of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers are, not any local engineers' clubs, but national societies each claiming the exclusive allegiance of different sections of the trade^ The pattern-makers, for instance, came to the conclusion in 1872 that their interests were negfected in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and formed the United Pattern-makers' Association, which now includes a large and increasing majority of this highly skilled class. Tte -Associated Society of Blacksmiths, originally a Glasgow local club, now dominates
Interunion Relations \ 1 1
its particular section of the trade on the Clyde and in Belfast, and has branches in the North of England. The Brass-workers, the Coppersmiths, and the Machine-minders have now all their own societies of national extent. The result has been that the Amalgamated Society of Engineers does not realise Newton's idea as regards any section what- ever. The' Boilermakers, who refused to have anything to do with amalgamation, and who have persistently put their energy into organising their own special craft, have succeeded, as we have mefitioned, in forming one undivided, consolidated, and centralised society for the entire kingdom. Very different is the condition of the engineers. Neither the fitters nor the smiths, the pattern-makers nor the machine-minders, the brass-workers nor the coppersmiths, are united in any one society, or able to maintain a uniform trade policy, even for their own section of the industry. For all this confusion, the enthusiastic adherents of the Amalgamated Society have gone on preaching the one remedy of an ever-wider amalgama- tion. " The future basis of the Amalgamated Society," urged Mr. Tom Mann in 1891, " must be one that will admit every workman engaged in connection with the engineering trades, and who is called upon to exhibit mechanical skill in the performance of his labor. This would include men on milling and drilling machines, tool-makers, die-sinkers, and electrical engineers, and it would make it necessary to have the requisite staff at the general ofifice to cater for so large a constituency, as there are at least 250,000 men engaged in the engineering and machine trades of the United Kingdom, and the work of organising this body must be undertaken by the A. S. E."^ Somewhat against the advice of the more experienced ofiScials, successive delegate meetings have included within the society one section of workmen after another. At the delegate meeting of 1892, which opened, the society to practically every competent workman in thei most miscellaneous engineering establishment, it was even
' Address to the East End Institute of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, London, in Trade Unionist, loth October 1891.
1 1 2 Trade Union Structure
urged by some branches that the boundaries should be still further enlarged, so as to perniit the absprption of plumbers and ironfounders. This proposal was with some reluctance rejected, but only on the ground that it would have brought the Amalgamation into immediate collision with the 16,278 members of the Friendly Society of Iron- founders (established 1809); and with the compact and militant United Operative Plumbers' Society (established 1848, membership 8758), rivals too powerful to be lightly encountered. Each successi ve widenit^jy of_th e amals[a ina- tion bringsi t in fact, into con flict_witb^ a ^^^V,^'^ nnmhpr of ptlier unions, who _ becom e its_e mbittered en emies. The very competition between rival societies which Nfewton's amal- gamation was intended to supersede, has, through this all- inclusive
