contribute their special knowledge to the common council, but are unable to promise obedience to the federal decision, unless it commends itself as a suit- able compromise, or carries with it the weight of an almost unanimous consensus of opinion.^
The problem of finding a stable unit of government and of determining the relation between superior and subordinate authorities seems, therefore, to be in a fair way of solution
1 We revert to these considerations when, in describing the Trade Union machinery for political action, we come to deal with such federations as th« Trade Union Congress and the local Trades Councils.
VOL. I F 2
13S Trade Union Structure
in the Trade Union world. With the ever - increasing mobility of labor and extension of industry, the local trade club has had to give place to a combination of national extent. So long as the craft or occupation is fairly uniform from one end of the kingdom to the other, the geographical boundaries of the autonomous state must, in the Trade Union world, ultimately coincide with those of the nation itself. We have seen, too, how inevitably the growth of national Trade Unions involves, for strategic, and what may be called military reasons, the reduction of local autonomy to a minimum, and the complete centralisation of all financial, and therefore of all executive government at the national headquarters. This tendency is strengthened by economic considerati^s which we shall develop in a subsequent chapter. Of the Trade Union is to have any success in I its main function of improving the circumstances of its i members' employment, it must build up a dyke of a uniform minimum of conditions for identical work throughout the kingdomj This uniformity of conditions, or, indeed, any industrial influence whatsoever, implies a cer tain uniformity and consistency of trade policy, which is Jonly rendered possible by centralisation of administraticuy So far, our conclusions lead, it would seem, to the absolute simplicity of one all-embracing centralised autocracy. But, in the Trade Union world, the problem of harmonising local ad- ministration and central control, which for a moment we seemed happily to have e;ot rid of, comes back in an even more intractable form. VThs very aim of uniformity of con- ditions, the very fact that uniformity of trade policy is indispensable to efficiency, makes it almost impossible to combine in a single organisation, with a common piirse, a common executive, and a common staff of salaried officials, men of widely different occupations and grades of skill, widely different Standards of Life and industrial needs, or widely different numerical strengths and strategic oppor- tunifiesj^ A Trade Union is essentially an organisation for securing certain concrete and definite advantages for all its
Interunion Relations 139
members—advantages which differ from trade to trade according to its technical processes, its economic position, and, it may be, the geographical situation in which it is carried on. Hence all the attempts at "General Unions\ have, in our view, been inevitably foredoomed to failu^J The hundreds of thousands of the working class who joined the "Grand National Consolidated Trades Union" in 1833–34 came together, it is true, on a common basis of human brother- hood, and with a common faith in the need for a radical reconstruction of society. But instead of inaugurating a " New Moral World," either by precept or by political revolu- tion, they found themselves as a Trade Union, fighting the employers in the Lancashire cotton mills to get shorter hours of labor, in the Leeds cloth trade to obtain definite piecework rates, in the London building trade to do away with piecework altogether, in Liverpool to abolish the sub- contractor, in the hosiery trade to escape from truck and deductions. Each trade, in short, translated " human brother- hood" into the remedying of its own particular technical grievance, and the central executive wg£_jquite unable to check the accuracy of the translation. ^The whole history of Trade Unionism confirms the inference that a Trade Union, formed as it is, for the distinct purpose of obtaining concrete and definite material improvements in the conditions of its members' employment, cannot, in its simplest form, safely extend beyond the area within which thos e ident ical improvements are shared by all its members—cannot spread, that is to say, beyond the bo undaries of a single occupa- tionv_jBut the discovery ol thiT simple unit of government does not exhaust the problem. Whilst the differences between the sections render complete amalgamation im- practicable, their identityjn other interests makes some bond of union imperative. I The most efficient form of Trade Union organisation is therefore one in which the several secfiortS can be united ibr the purposes that they have m common, to the exte nt to which identity of interest prevails, and no further, whilst at the same time each section preserves
140 Trade. Union Structure
complete auto nomy wherever its interests or purposes diverg e j rom those of its allies^ \ But this is only another form'of the difficult political problem of the relation of supreme to subordinate authorities. Whilst the student of political democracy has been grappling with the question of how to distribute administration between central and local author- ities, the unlettered statesmen of the Trade Union world nave had to decide the still more difficult issue of ^w to distribute power between general and sectio nal industrial combinations, both of national extent./ |Tne solution has been found in a series of widening an3cross-cutting federa- tions, each of which combines, to the extent only of its own particular objects, those organisations which are conscious ^ their identity of purpose. Instead of a simple form of democratic organisation we get, therefore, one of extreme complexity. Where the difficulties of the problem have feen rightly apprehended, and the whole industry has been organised on what may be called a single plane, the result may be, as in the case of the Cotton Operatives, a complex but harmoniously working democratic machine of remarkable efficiency and stability. Where, on the other hand, the industry has been organised on incompatible bases, as among the Engineers, we find a complicated tangle of relationships producing rivalry and antagonism, in which effective common action, even for such purposes as are common to all sections, becomes almost impossibjgj
") Tfade Union organisation, if it is to reach its highest possible efficiency, must therefore assume a federal form.^ Instead of a supreme central government, delegating parts of its power to subordinate local authorities, we may expect to see the Trade Union world developing into an elaborate series of federations, among which it will be difficult to decide where 1 the sovereignty really resides. Where the several sections closely resemble each other in their cirO cumstances and needs, where their common purposes are! relatively numerous and important, and where, as a result/ individual secession and subsequent isolation would be)
Interunion Relations 14^
dangerous, the federal tie will be strong, and the federal" government will, in_ effect, become the supreme authority. At the other end of the scale will stand those federations, little more than opportunities for consultation, in which the contracting parties retain each a real autonomy, and use the federal executive as a convenient, but strictly subordinate machinery for securing those limited purposes that they have in common. And we have ventured to suggest, as an interesting corollary, that the basis of re- presentation s hould, in all these c o nstitutions, vary according to the charact er of the bond of union, r epresent ation propo rtionate to membership being;' perfe ^tV spplirnhln nrrl^' to a homogeneous organisati on, and decreasing in sui tability with every degree 01 dissimilarity hetvfreen the- cnnatk-aefKfe- bodies;^ Where the sectional interests are not only distinct, but may, in certain cases, be even antagonistic, as, for instance, in industries subject to demarcation disputes, rule by majority vote must be frankly abandoned, and the repre- sentatives of societies widely differing in numerical strength must, under penalty of common failure, consent to meet on equal terms, to discover, by consultation, how best to conciliate the interests of all.
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