Industrial Democracy. Sidney Webb
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.
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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 1 periodically to shift the seat of this authority long manifested itself and still lingers in some trades,* the growth of anj official staff, and the necessity of securing accommodation on some durable tenancy, has practically made the head-f quartgrs—stationary, even if the change has not been ex-j pressly recorded in the rules. Thus the Friendly Society of Ironfounders has retained its head office in London since 1 846, and the Friendly Society of Operative Stonemasons since 1883. The United Society of Boilermakers, which long wandered from port to port, has remained in Newcastle since 1880; and finally" settled the question in 1888 by building itself palatial offices on a freehold site.' Here again
^ Rule 12 in the editions of Rules of 1891 and 1894.
' Notably the Plumbers and Irondressers. In 1877 a proposal at the general council of the Operative Bricklayers' Society to convert the executive into a shifting one, changing the headquarters every third year, was only defeated by a casting vote. — Operative Bricklaytrf Society Trade Circular, September 1877.
^ Along with this change has gone the differentiation of national business from that of the branch. The committee work of the larger societies became more than could be undertaken, in addition to the branch management, by men giving only their evenings. We find, therefore, the central executive committee becoming a body distinct from the branch committee, sometimes (as in the United Society of Operative Plumbers) elected by the same constituents, but more usually by the members of all the branches within a convenient radius of the central office. Thus the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters gives the election to the members within twelve miles of the head office—that is, to the thirty-five branches in and near Manchester—and the Friendly Society of Ironfounders to the six branches of the
1 8 Trade Union Structure
^the deeply -rooted desire on the part of Trade Union demo- icrats to secure to each section an equal and identical share «n the government of the society has had to give way before >the necessity of obtaining e fficient ad ministration. In ceasing to be movable the executive committee lost even such , moral influence over the general secretary as was conveyedj^ by an express and recent delegation by the remainder of the society. The salaried official, elected by the votes of all the members, could in fact claim to possess more representative authority than a committee whose functions as