the Annual Report for 1837.
' Address of the Bristol branch of the Friendly Society of Ironfounders to the members at large (in Annual Report for 1849).
' Both the idea of rotation of office, and that of a local governing branch, can be traced to the network of village sick-clubs which existed all over England in the eighteenth century. In 1824 these clubs were described by a hostile critic as " under the management of the ordinary members who succeed to the several offices
14 Trade Union Structure
executive was confined to that of a centre of communication between practically autonomous local branches, no alteration in the machinery was necessary. The duties of the secretary, like those of his committee, were not beyond the competence of ordinary artisans working at their trade and devoting only their evenings to their official business. But with the multir plication of branches and the formation of a central fund, the secretarial work of a national union presently absorbed the whole time of a single officer, to whom, therefore, a salary jjad to be assigned. As the salary came from the common fund, the right of appointment passed, without question, from the branch , rneeting to " the voices " of the whole body of members. ( Thus the general secretary was singled out for a unique positiofi : alone among the officers of the union he was elected by the whole body of members. \ Meanwhile the supreme authority continued to be " the TOfees." Every pro-, position not covered by the original " articles," together with all questions of 'peace and war, was submitted to the votes of the members.^ But this was not all. Each branch, in
in rotation ; frequently without being qualified either by ability, independence, or impartiality for the due discharge of their respective offices ; or under the control of a standing committee, composed of the most active and often the least eligible members residing near i he place of meeting."—The Constitution cf Friendly Societies upon Legal and Scientific Principles, by Rev. John Thomas Becher (2nd edition, London, 1824), p. 50,
Comparing small things with great, we may say that the British Empire is administered by a " governing branch," The business common to the Empire as a whole is transacted, not by imperial or federal officers, but by those of one part of the Empire, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland ; and they are supervised, not by an Imperial Diet or Federal Assembly, but by the domestic legislature at Westminster.
' The very ancient United Society of Brushmakers, which dates from the early part of the eighteenth century, retains to this day its archaic method of collecting " the voices." In London, said to be the most conservative of all the districts, no alteration of rule is made without " sending round the box " as of yore. In the society's ancient iron box are put all the papers relating to the subject under dis- cussion, and a member out of employment is deputed to carry the box from shop to shop until it has travelled " all round the trade." When it arrives at a shop, all the men cease work and gather round ; the box is opened, its contents are read and discussed, and the shop delegates are then and there instructed how to vote at the next delegate meeting. The box is then refilled and sent on to the next shop. Old minutes of 1829 show that this custom has remained unchanged, down to the smallest detail, for, .at any rate, a couple of generations. It is probably nearly two centuries old.
Primitive Democracy 1 5
general meeting assembled, claimed the right to have any proposition whatsoever submitted to the vote of the society as a whole. And thus we find, in almost every Trade Union which has a history at all, a most instructive series of experi- ments in the use, misuse, and limitations of the Referendum^
Such was the typical Trade Union constitution of the last generation. In a few cases it has survived, almost unchanged, down to the present day, just as its pre- decessor, the archaic local club governed by the general meeting, still finds representatives in the Trade Union world. But wherever an old Trade Union has maintained its vitality, its constitution has been progressively modified, whilst the most powerful of the modern unions have been formed on a different pattern. An examination of this evolutionary process will bring home to us the transitional character of the existing constitutional forms, and give us valuable hints towards the solution, in a larger field, of the problem of uniting efficient administration with popular control.
We have already noted that, in passing from a local tSN a national organisation, the Trade Union unwittingly left behind the ideal of primitive democracy. The setting apart j of one man to do the clerical work destroyed the possibility of equal and identical service by all the members, and laid the foundation of a separate governing class. The practice of requiring members to act in rotation was silently abandoned^ Once chosen for his post, the general secretary could rely with confidence, unless he proved himself obviously unfit or grossly incompetent, on being annually re-elected. Spending all day at office work, he soon acquired a professional expert- ness quite out of the reach of his fellow- members at the bench or the forge. And even if some other member possessed natural gifts equal or superior to the acquired skill of the existing officer, there was, in a national organisa- tion, no opportunity of making these qualities known. The general secretary, on the other hand, was always adver- tising his name and his personality to the thousands of
1 6 Trade Union Structure
members by the printed circulars and financial reports, which became the only link between the scattered branches, and afforded positive evidence of his competency to perform the regular work of the office. With every increase in the society's membership, with every extension or elaborationy of its financial system or trade policy, the position of the salaried official became, accordingly, more and more sequrej^ "The general secretaries themselves changed with the develop ment of their office. The work could no longer be efficiently performed by an ordinary artisan, and some preliminary office training became almost indispensable^ The Coalminers, for instance, as we have shown in t5uf- description of* the Trade Union world, have picked their secretaries to a large extent from a specially trained section, the checkweigh-men.^ The Cotton Operatives have even adopted a system of competitive examination among the candidates for their staff appointments." In other unions any candidate who has not proved his capacity for office work and trade negotiations would stand at a serious disadvantage in the election, where the choice is coming evpry /day to be confined more clearly to the small class of minor officials. The paramount necessity of efficient administration has co-operated with this permanence in producing a progressive differentiation of an official governing class, more and more marked off by character, training, and duties from the bullT ^ the members. The annual election of the general secretary by a popular vote, far from leading to frequent rotation of office and equal service by all the members, has, in fact, invariably resulted in permanence of tenure exceeding even that of the English civil servant. It is^ accordingly interesting to notice that, in the later rules of some of the most influential of existing unions, the ipractical permanence of the official staff is tacitly recognised (by the omission of all provision for re-election. Indeed, the
1 History of Trade Unionism, p. 291.
2 Ibid. p. 294 ; see also the subsequent chapter on ' ' The Method of Collective Bargaining," where a specimen examination paper is reprinted.
Primitive Democracy 17
Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton-spinners goes so far as expressly to provide in its rules that the general secretary " shall continue in office so long as he gives satis- faction." ^
While everything was thus tending to exalt the position^ of the salaried official, the executive committee, under whose direction he was placed, being composed of men working at their trade, retained its essential weakness. Though modi- fied in unimportant particulars, it continued in nearly all the old societies to be chosen only by one geographical sectionj of the members. At first each branch served in rotation as the seat of government. This quickly gave way to a system of selecting the governing branch from among the more important centres of the trade. Moreover, though the desire
