Trade Union Structure
rank and file. Presently some dispute occurs between an employer and the members of one of the unions. These workmen may be dismissed by the employer, or withdrawn by order of their own district committee. The officers of the rival union soon hear of the vacancies from the firm in question. Members of their own society are walking the streets in search of work, and drawing Out of Work pay from the funds, f^o let i these take the places left vacant—to " blackleg " the rival society—is to commit the gravest crime against the Trade Unionist faith._J Unfortunately, in many cases, the temptation is irresistible. The friction between the rival organisations, the personal ill-feeling of their officers, the traditions of past grievances, the temptation of pecuniary gain both to the workmen and to the union, all co-operate to make the occasion " art exception." At this stage any pretext suffices. The unreasonableness of the other society's demand, the fact that it did not consult its rival before taking action, even the non-arrival of the letter officially announcing the strike, serves as a phiusible excuse in the subsequent recrimi- nations. Scarcely a year passes without the Trade Union Congress being made the scene of a heated accusation by one society or another, that some other union has " blacklegged " a dispute in which it was engaged, and thereby deprived its members of all the results of their combination.^
• Whenever rivalry and competition for members have existed between unions in the same industry we iind numberless cases of " blacklegging." The relations, for instance, between the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and all the sectional societies, abound in unfortunate instances on the one side or the other. The twc societies of Bricklayers have, in the past, frequently accused each other's members of the same crime. The "excursions across the Border" of the English and Scottish societies of Tailors and Plumbers have been enlivened by similar recrimi- nations, which are also bandied about among the several unions of general laborers. The Coalmining and Cotton manufacturing industries are honorably free from this feature. An exceptionally bad case of an established union becoming, through blacklegging, a mere tool of the employers, came to light at the Trade Union Congress of 1892, and was personally investigated by us.
The Glasgow Harbour Laborers' Union, established among the Clyde steve- dores in 1853, had, up to 1889, maintained an honorable record for stability and success. In the latter year it found itself, with only 230 members, menaced with extinction by the sudden uprising of the National Union of Dock Laborers in Great Britain and Ireland, a society organised on the antagonistic idea of including every kind of dock and wharf laborers in a national amalgamation. The small.
Interunion Relations 1 2 1
The foregoing detailed description has placed the reader in a position to appreciate the disastrous effect oL com- petition between Trade Unions for members. [Whilst seriously impairing their financial stability as benefit clubs, this rivalry cuts at the root of all effective trade combination. It is no exaggeration to say that to competition between overlapping unions is to be attributed nine- tenths of the ineffectiveness of the Trade Union worldj The great army of engineering operatives, for instance, though exceptional in training and intelligence, and enrolled in stable and well- administered societies, have as yet not succeeded either in negotiating with the employers on anything like equal terms, or in maintaining among themselves any common policy whatsoever. An even larger section of the wage -earning world—that engaged in the great industry of transport—has so far failed, from a similar cause, to build up any really effective Trade Unionism. The millions of laborers, who
old-fashioned, and local society, with its traditions of exclusiveness and "privilege," refused to merge itself, but offered to its big rival a mutual "next preference" working arrangement—that is to say, whilst each society maintained for its own members a preferential right to be taken on at the wharves or yards where they were accustomed to work, it should accord to the members of the other society the right to fill any further vacancies at those yards or wharves in preference to outsiders. The answer to this was a peremptory refusal on the part of the National Union to recognise the existence of its tiny predecessor, whose members accordingly found themselves absolutely excluded from work. The National Union no doubt calculated that it would, in this way, compel the smaller society to yield. But at the very moment it had a great struggle on hand, both in Liver- pool and Glasgow, with one of the principal shipping firms. Communications were quickly opened up between that firm and the Glasgow Harbour Laborers' Society, with the result that the latter undertook to do the firm's work, and thus at one blow not only defeated tlje aggressive pretensions of the National Union but also secured its own existence. This line of conduct was repeated whenever a dispute arose between the employers and any Union on the Clyde. When the Blast-fiimacemen on strike had successfully appealed to the National Amalgamated Sailors' and Firemen's Union, not to unload Spanish pig iron, the Glasgow Harbour Laborers' Union promptly came to the employers' rescue. During the strike of the Scottish Railway Servants' Union, the same society was to the fore in supplying "scab laborers." Its crowning degradation, in Trade Union eyes, came in an alliance with the Shipping Federation, the powerful combination by which the employers hav'e, since 1892, sought to crush the whole Trade Union movement !n the waterside industries. Its conduct was, in that year, brought before the Trade Union Congress, which happened to meet at Glasgow, and the Congress almost unanimously voted the exclusion of its delegates.
122 Trade Union Structure
must in any case find it difficult to maintain a common organisation, are constantly hampered in their progress by the existence of competing societies which, starting from different industries, quickly pass into general unions, in- cluding each other's members. Indeed, with the remarkable exceptions of the coal and cotton industries, and, to a lesser extent, that of house-building, there is hardly a great trade in the country in which the workmen's organisations are_not seriously crippled by this fatal dissension.
) Now, experience shows that the permanent cause o f this competitive rivalry and overlapping between unions is th eir o rganisatio n upon bases inconsistent with each other. When two societies mclude and exclude precisely the same sections of workmen, competition between them loses half its bitter- ness, and the solution of the difficulty is only a question of timej We see, for instance, since 1862, the Amalgamated SocifityLflLCa rpente rs and Joiners rapidly distancing its elder competitor, the General Union of Carpenters and Joiners (established 1827)! But—because—»he . mem bers of both societies belong to identically the same trade, are paid by the same methods, earn the same rates, work the same hours, have the same customs and needs, and are in no way to be distinguished from each other, the branches in a given town find no difficulty in concerting, by means of a joint committee, a common trade policy. riA.nd although the existence of two societies weakens the financial position of the one* as well as of the other, the identity of the members' income and requirements, and jtheir constant intercourse, tend steadily to an approximation of the respective scales of contribution and benefitsjCTlnder these circumstances the tendency to amalgamation is, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, almost irresistible, and is usually delayed only by the natural reluctance of some particular official to abdicate the position of leadership.
1 VThe problem which the ^gineers, the transit workers,
'and the laborers have so far failed to solve, is how to
define a trade.) |_Among the engineers, for instance, there is
Interumon Relations 123
no general agreement which groups of workmen have interests sufficiently distinct from the remainder as to make it necessary for them to combine in a sectional organisation ; and there is but little proper appreciation of the relation of these sectional mterests to those which all engineering mechanics have in commoii|^ The enthusiast for amalgama- tion is always harping on the necessity of union amongst all classes of engineering workmen in order to abolish systematic overtime, to reduce the normal hours of labor, and to obtain recognition of Trade Union conditions from \ the government. To the member of the United Pattern- makers' Association or of the Associated
