The Responsibility of a Trade-Union

I

WHAT we in Britain have had knocked into us and seem now to be settling down to is the realization that a tradeunion, to make its way and do its job and keep in trim, must go in for a good deal more than putting the screw on employers to get for labor as good a share as can rightly be got of the joint product of industry. It must never lose sight of that, of course; but the procuring of such a share must come on top of a host of other activities or it will not be effective.

The trade-union that hopes to flourish must before all else be a friendly society for its members, helping them in times of ill health and hard luck and old age out of funds to which they have contributed. It must be an advice bureau, to tell them the way out of their occupational troubles and trials. It must be a court of occupational justice as between man and man, keeping the peace among its members by the quality of its justice. It must be an efficiency and suggestion bureau, so that it can tell the employer how to save the waste or make the gain that will justify a higher wage — thereby taking the lead now and again as a change from acting as a drag on production improvement. Such a union is not a frenzied thing that lives by crises; it lives by service rendered. By virtue of its living utility it is the more alive and strong when crisis comes. On that day, when it squares up to the employer, it does so with its feet well placed and its muscles in trim.

But the union that counts and endures with us is not necessarily the one that is forever squaring up to the employer. It has all sorts of other business with him. It has the business of adjusting the thousand and one differences that are occurring month in, month out, between the man on the job and his immediate chief. The good workman is often enough a poor hand at arguing and a worse hand at bargaining. Few of us are really tiptop at arguing our own case — we get hot and bothered where we should of all things keep cool. That is why in life generally we so often call in an expert third party as a go-between. The workman specially needs a go-between, for, being in the pay of the other man, he often feels he dare not, even if he had the gift, say just what is in his mind. Often the employer himself suffers by that, for he thinks he has left the workman happy and satisfied when he has n’t.

The only go-between who can say what the workman really wants said, and say it without fear, is one who is not in the employer’s pay — in other words, the trade-union official. There have been, and will be, company union officials who can find out what the employee wants to say and can say it. There have been and will be labor superintendents who can do it. But the fact that they are in the employer’s power or pay must always be a hindrance on major issues. The spokesman who is not on the firm’s pay roll is the one who can best represent the man on the line to the man in the board room.

The capable trade-union official is no less a boon to the employer when it comes to passing word along in the other direction. The man in the office has things to say to the man at the bench. Written instructions and printed notices are all very well, word passed down through the foreman is all very well; but if it is a matter in which the employee may suspect a catch, or one that touches his feelings closely, it is better to pass the message along, or at any rate get it driven home, by one of his own kind and company.

II

Let me illustrate with a few figures the importance of the mutual-aid plan of our British trade-unionism. Those of our trade-unions in regard to which there is detailed information (and they cover the bulk of the movement) expend of their own money, in an average year, about £7,000,000. (I say ’of their own money’ because some receive and pay out state unemployment benefit, in recent total about £2,000,000 a year, to their members along with unemployment benefit of their own.) Of this £7,000,000 of their own money very nearly half will have gone in mutual-aid benefits to members, distributed as follows: about 10 per cent in unemployment pay to supplement the state benefit; about 9 per cent in sick and accident pay to supplement whatever is being received under state measures; about 10 per cent in funeral and other payments; and 15 per cent in superannuation pay to aged and retired members or their dependents. Those outgoings represent, as I say, nearly half of the whole. For the rest, a little will have gone in grants to other trade-unions and to federations, and a little to the political fund for the support of trade-union representatives at Westminster. Finally there is one small item, and one large: some 3 or 4 per cent — on the average for the last ten years — will have gone in dispute benefit; and some 40 per cent will have gone in working expenses.

To see our trade-unions as they really are one must think of the contributions being collected, by workmen members authorized to perform that office, at the place of work or place of meeting or any other convenient spot; one must think of large and small local offices or hired meeting places or front rooms or kitchens of branch secretaries’ homes, to which members who have struck a bad time or a personal misfortune go to make their statements and draw their money, and to which aged and retired members go or send for their superannuation; places where every night a member or two will drop in to unload a grievance or clear up a difficulty, or to ask perhaps if any employer has telephoned for more help. One must think, too, of regular meetings in such places, with a worker chairman and worker officers and a part-time or full-time paid secretary, and a not too good attendance (except when there is trouble in the air) — meetings at which differences between members are heard and adjusted, at which complaints concerning work or wages or conditions or treatment are heard and argued, and at which policy, local and national, is discussed in the light of whatever the head office has said or may want to know.

It is in these innumerable homely quarters that our trade-unionism has its being. One must think of the paid secretary taking his cue or his orders from the meeting (which runs him as he runs it), and between whiles carrying on with his job of administering, expounding, advising, exhorting, recruiting, visiting, calming, rousing, and adjusting — through the long days of the seven-day week. It is these activities which absorb that 40 per cent of the subscriptions which goes in ’working expenses.’ It is good value for the money.

In all this, or nearly all, the tradeunion secretary is a trouble-smoother — not a trouble-maker. Day in, day out, he is busy securing, from employers, adjustments of a wage rate here and a time schedule there. Over the whole field thousands of such adjustments are being made by trade-union officers every month that goes by. There is material for a quarrel in each — but the adjustment is made without it. Naturally, none of these adjustments get into the papers. Keeping the peace is not news.

I must beware of talking too much of the secretary or agent as though he were the union. He is not. The union is the corporate body of members. The authority is a corporate authority. Of course, with the trade-union as with any other body, sometimes the secretariat sways the membership more than the membership rules the secretariat. But the trade-union personage who lets himself become a union boss instead of a union secretary is generally in for a fall. Even the born leader of trade-unionism does well to disperse as widely as possible among his members the faculty of leadership. Trade-union government must be government ‘by the people’: all other drifts have to be resisted, and every sensible trade-unionist knows it.

But the trade-union secretary’s efforts at adjustment do not always succeed. Naturally he tries often enough for more than he can get. Time and again a deadlock is reached. He has seen the foreman, or the manager, or even the responsible director — perhaps more than once. Perhaps the general secretary has been down from the head office. Neither side will give way — or not enough to make a compromise. The man or men are ready to down tools. But now comes into play, if the trade-union and the employers’ association have a healthy history, that conciliation or arbitration machinery that has been ready and waiting for precisely this. There will be a clause in the collective agreement. The clause will require a difference to be examined in a prescribed manner before there is any downing of tools or locking of doors. The agreement has been drawn up and signed by both organizations — the trade-union and the employers’ association. There are thousands of such agreements in being. They are the scriptures of Industrial Relations. They are the book of the Law and the Prophets. They are the price list and the timetable and the guide to correct manners. They insist on every effort being made to settle a difference on the spot with the least possible fuss. But they also provide, should that fail, for formal examinations of the issue, first in the district and then, if that should fail, more centrally.

This machinery for the settlement of differences, for the deferring of strikes and lockouts, is, in Britain as in other lands, a homemade article invented and created out of the conjoint good sense of workers’ and employers’ organizations. There is no force of law behind the agreements. They are purely voluntary. Nothing went into the making of them but the desire to settle differences without a stoppage of work if possible. They rest upon nothing more than the inner compulsion that makes any reasonable man want to abide by any agreement to which he has put his hand.

To get the very best for his people out of conciliation and arbitration procedure, the trade-union representative needs a multiple equipment. He needs understanding and ability and character. He must know his men, he must know the work, he must know the employers’ position, he must know just how far he can go and just how much can be got and how to negotiate for it. He must have his men behind him. He must know they trust his judgment. Bluff and bluster and bounce are not of much use because they create neutralizing resistances. Low cunning may succeed once but not twice, or, if twice, not thrice. The man who honestly and sanely wants the best for the industry will get the most for his men.

Once in a way all mediation provisions fail. One or the other side will not accept the highest tribunal’s recommendation or award. It is the eve of the handing in of notices. The issue may be one that started down on the machine floor and has worked its way up. Or it may be one that started at the top — a matter of broad labor policy emerging from the development of ideas and standards or from economic changes that are affecting industry from without, such as fluctuations in the volume and allocation of buying or in the price level, or from resentment at and resistance to some hated move on the part of the employers. Now the trade-union leader needs all his powers. Strike? Or no strike?

The strike, like its rarer complement the lockout, is a game at which both sides generally lose, and often enough know they will lose. A short sharp strike can score a real win; but in the long-drawn-out strike the fruits of victory rot. No responsible leader on either side wants a strike. Yet mark this: it is only the dread of a stoppage that will bring some negotiators to agree. Now the longer it is since there has been a disastrous stoppage the less sharp is the memory of what a stoppage means. So every now and again someone must strike or lock out to give others a reminder of the folly of striking or locking out. The shrewd trade-union leader knows that, and does not care very much to let his union — especially the kind of mutualaid union I have been describing — go as a victim to the sacrifice, to impoverish its members, deplete its funds, lose grip, and undo the work of years. Yet someone must do it sometime for the sake of the others. And of course there is always a chance, just a chance, of winning more than is lost.

If it does come to a strike, then what the union needs above all else is cohesion and loyalty. It needs just that abiding allegiance that can only come as the result of long years of mutual helpfulness. Because it lacks this background, the union that is no more than a fighting force is not likely to win a fight. It is not only that to win requires this background of tried and trusted and practised comradeship; it is also that the technique and the spirit of fighting — and the language of fighting, for that matter — do not fit industrial differences. Industry is essentially a matter of working together — not of striving against. To say, ‘We won’t work with you on such terms,’ is all right. Any man or group may feel and act so. To say, ‘We’ll injure you until you agree to our working with you on other terms,’ does n’t make as good sense. It is one of the minor tragedies of our language that the word ‘strike’ has come to be used for stopping work. It suggests and prompts violence. What it meant in its origins was no more than striking tools — on the analogy of a ship striking colors. It is a vivid word: but there is a lot to be said for dropping it and speaking, instead, of ‘ stoppage.’ We are tending that way.

The trade-union official whose pacific duties have taken him into frequent contact with his opposite on the employers’ side sees, far better than one who has been kept at arm’s length, the importance of letting as little as possible happen during a stoppage that will be likely to make bad blood when the stoppage ends and work is to be resumed. It is a nice problem. Once the men are out the official must strive to keep up their spirits so that they present a bold, united front. In that striving there is every temptation to whip up steadfastness with bitterness. He has to remember the day of the going back, for the men want to go back to a works, not a cesspit.

III

I have spoken of the state of affairs in which the trade-union officials and the employers’ officials are in running contact through all the long periods of industrial peace. But what of those cases in which the employers have always stoutly refused to have any dealings with trade-unionism? Yes, we have such employers in England. They are not numerous nowadays, but they include a few of our largest modern firms making the mass-produced novelties and specialties of this our age — cars and so on. Their policy is one of ’High Wages, No Union.’ It is not that union membership is forbidden in the terms of contract; but rather that union talk or activity is smelled out and frowned upon and that to any communication from a tradeunion the company is deaf and dumb.

Often enough there are elaborate welfare provisions. There may even be an apparatus of department spokesmen and periodical joint committees. In a firm employing 5000 or 20,000 work people this may to some extent look like and even serve as genuine trade-unionism. It has, however, three radical shortcomings: the spokesman who says what is not liked by the firm can be sacked; the work people are denied corporate common cause with those employed in other firms; and there must be no formal linkage with national tradeunionism. It has its points, this nonunion policy, for the few firms that by particular personal genius are well ahead of competitors; but the points are perilous. It is a separatist policy that hampers the development of a national and wholesome trade-unionism. From that the body politic suffers. But there are dangers also for the firms themselves. There may come a day on which the one thing by which they might have been saved from disaster is not available to them. We have, of course, no law under which an employer can be compelled to recognize the trade-union. We have powerful employers’ associations in all the staple and long-established industries, membership of which implies working with the trade-union; but the giant firm in the newer branches of manufacture can stay outside if it so wills, and play its lone hand with all the chances of gain and catastrophe that the lone hand entails.

By having no truck with trade-unionism the lone-hand giant hopes to keep the attitude of its employees to their employer free of doctrinarian poison. It sees the trade-union movement as run by deadheads but driven by hotheads. Even the employer who looks on the trade-union as part of the national order can be sorely worried by the tradeunion’s revolutionary streak. But neither gets so worried about it as does the tradeunion leader.

There are few prominent personalities in our trade-union movement who are not committed to a belief in ‘the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.’ To that extent they are critical of an order in which the means of production are privately owned and industry is run for private profit. Their avowed desire is to see it changed. But they do not let their desire for change warp their dealings, as trade-unionists, with the actual elements of the order as it is. They do not let the dream ruin the business. We all have to meet and to resolve, at every turn of our lives, that selfsame conflict between the desire to ‘shatter it to bits and then remould it’ and the need for making the best, while we live in and by it, of the ‘sorry scheme of things entire.’

It is not wholly dissociation between dream and business. Nor is it altogether a man’s natural disinclination to play ducks and drakes with the thing of which he is the inspirer and the loyal servant, his trade-union, by double-crossing its purposes. It is also that he has the sense to know that trade-unionism is not the instrument for achieving the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by socialism or communism, however much in his heart of hearts he may desire that consummation.

There is a sprinkling of lesser leaders in our trade-union movement who are committed to ‘the overthrow of the capitalist order and its substitution by a dictatorship of the proletariat.’ They are committed, that is, in principle. They, too, manage to keep their ultimate objectives in the background while they direct the fortunes of their union. They must; or their direction will inevitably fail, and their union fall on evil days. No man can serve two objects — one of coöperation, the other of wreckage.

Indeed, what worries most our tradeunion leaders is not conflict of purpose in themselves but the presence of antitrade-union elements in their membership. We have our Communist Party. Its few members can make a great deal of trouble, for they are fervent and zealous. Their revolutionary strategy is not easy to follow; but it appears to be to wreck the present trade-unions, then with a fiercer trade-unionism to wreck the employer, and then out of the wholesale wreckage to build a fairer civilization. Naturally the trade-unions dislike this programme and disapprove of its promoters. There can generally be heard in our labor circles the sizzle of some trade-union pouring cold water on its red-hot tail.

One tends always to make divisions of persons rather than of thoughts. In truth the stolid and the fiery are to be found in some proportion in us all, the ingredients varying from occasion to occasion. They are to be found in the typical trade-unionist. He too has to manage his own duality. A workingman philosopher told me how he does it. Let me explain that in most towns we have a Trades and Labor Council, usually with a hall of its own. Here the members and officers of all the local unions can forgather to discuss labor policy and the labor goal. My workman friend explained: ‘We overthrow the capitalist order every fourth Friday at the Trades Council, but every other day of the month we’re busy at the branch.’

The trade-union that will play its rightful part in the economic order of the future is the one that carries on its humdrum day-to-day services and binds its members together in mutual fellowship. The trade-union leader who will stand highest and surest in the movement is the one who is most in touch with its members on the mutual-aid side of his union’s multifarious activities. We have in Great Britain no experience of trade-unionism suddenly thrust upon masses of work people. There was a great crowding in or roping in of members during and immediately after the war; but they fell away as soon as the testing time came. For vigorous tradeunionism you must have not a mob but a membership. You must have a membership capable of producing the kind of leaders that alone can make trade-unionism a living and serving part of the entire economic and political order. For there is need not only of a collection of separate trade-unions led and officered by men, or women, whose one concern is the vocational welfare of their particular members; there is need also of a national organ of all the unions where inter-union rivalries can be adjusted, where the greed of particular unions can be checked, and where a trade-union policy that will have regard not only for the interests of trade-unionists but also for the common weal can be framed and promulgated.

This we have developed, over long years, in our Trades-Union Congress with its General Council and its executive organs and officers. There is need of a trade-unionism that can take its part in national life as one of the mighty and enduring estates of the realm, one that can represent the aspirations and the demands of the citizen as wage earner. That kind of trade-unionism is not made at mass meetings or fed by fiery ‘stick-’em-up’ speeches. It grows out of the good earth of mutual service and mutual trust.