THE FRONTIER OF
CONTROL

A Study in British Workshop Politics

BY

CARTER L. GOODRICH

WITH A FOREWORD BY
R. H. TAWNEY

FELLOW OF BALLIOI. COI.LEOE, OXFORD; LATE MEMBEa OF THE
COAL INDUSTRY COMMISSION

m

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE

1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
HARCOURT, BRACK AND HOWE, nSTC.

THC QUINN AND BODEN COMPANY
HAHWAY, N, J

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Fob the fun I have had in doing this job, my
two heaviest obligations are to Amherst College —
for sending me to England to study — and to Mr.
Henry Clay — for directing my work here.

The trip was made possible by the award of
the Boswell Dwight Hitchcock Fellowship to
which the Trustees of Amherst College voted a
special addition. My personal debts to the college
and to the men working with President Meikle-
john there are too many and too great to mention
here. It is Professor Walton H. Hamilton, how-
ever, to whose teaching I owe my start in labor
problems and to whose planning I owe this special
opportunity.

To Mr. Henry Clay, late of the Ministry of
Labour and now Fellow of New College, Oxford,
I am indebted both for suggesting a job that
** wanted doing" and for giving me almost day-
to-day counsel and guidance in the doing of it.
Without the many kindnesses of Mr. Clay and his
friends, I could hardly have begun to find my way
about in an investigation of the current British
situation.

Mr. G. D. H. Cole and his associates of the
Labour Research Department were good enough

iii

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

to give me access to their useful collection of
trade union journals, constitutions, rules, etc. and
to help me in other ways. Mr. R. H. Tawney,
Mr. Arthur Grleason and Mr. Eobert W. Bruere
have very kindly read my manuscript and made
valuable suggestions.

Finally I feel warmly grateful to a large number
of people in various parts of Great Britain —
employers and workers, managers, foremen, trade
union secretaries, tutorial movement students and
tutors, government officials and ''rebel" shop
stewards — for the readiness and courtesy with
which they have taken time from their immediate
and practical concerns with industry to answer
the questions of an outsider and an American.

C. L, G.

LONDOK,

December 1, 1919.

CONTENTS

PAOB

Acknowledgments iii

Foreword by K. H. Tawney vii

Introduction: The Demand for Control , . 3
The Extent of Control :

SECTION

I— Control • . . 51

II— The Frontier of Control .... 56

III — Employment 63

IV — Unemployment 72

V— ''The Right to a Trade" . ... 92
VI— "TheRigJitto Sack" .... 104

VII— Promotion Ill

VIII— The Choice of Foremen . . . .117

IX — The Organization of Foremen . . 126

X — The Standard of Foremanship . .135

XI — Special Managerial Functions . . 146

XII— Methods of Payment .... 161

XIII — Technique: Restriction and Restrictions 176

XIV — Technique : Consultation over Changes . 186

XV — Technique : Insistence on Improvements 202

XVI — Technique: Suggestions and Inventions 217

XVII— Trade Policy: Joint Action . . .223

XVIII— Trade Policy: Workers' Demands . . 241

XIX— The Extent of Control . . . .253

Note on Sources 267

Index 273

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FOREWORD

By R. H. Tawney

It is a commonplace that during the past six
years the discussion of industrial and social prob-'
lems has shifted its center. Prior to the war
students and reformers were principally occupied
with questions of poverty. To-day their main in-
terest appears to be the government of industry.
An increasing number of trade unionists regard
poverty as a symptom of a more deeply rooted
malady which they would describe as industrial
autocracy and demand ''control." Anxious to
establish some modus vivendi which may promise
industrial peace, employers consider the conces-
sion of a workshop committee or an industrial
council. The Government gives the movement its
official blessing and has taken steps through the
Ministry of Labor to propagate the proposals of
Mr. Whitley's Committee. That ** control"
should stand to different sections of opinion for
quite different types of industrial structure was
only to be expected. But the necessity of meeting
some demand for which that is now the accepted
name is generally admitted. The formulation of
a ''Constitution for Industry" is conducted with
something of the same energy as that which past

vii

viii FOREWORD

generations have given to the discussion of a Con-
stitution for the State.

The change of angle is interesting. No doubt
it is all to the good that the task of reorganizing
industry should be recognized for what it is — a
particular case of the general problem of consti-
tutional government. But if it has been useful to
show that recent industrial movements have
''self-government" as their genus, it is no less im-
portant now to be clear as to their species. The
formulation of programs of ''joint control," such
as — to give only one example — that advanced by
the Miners' Federation, the demand for "indus-
trial democracy," the analogies drawn between
representative institutions in industry and in poli-
tics— these things have been invaluable in
broadening horizons and in opening windows
through which new ideas could pass. But the
emphasis needed to compel attention to the sig-
nificance of a point of view which till recently was
unfamiliar has by now, it may be suggested, done
its work. The new field for investigation and
practice has been mapped out. What is needed
to-day is to give precision to its content and to
test general propositions in the light of particular
facts. "Control" is the most ambiguous and
least self-explanatory of formulae. The aspira-
tions behind it may be genuine enough. But un-
less it is to remain a mere aspiration, it must be

FOREWORD ix

related much more closely than has been done
hitherto to the actual conditions of industrial or-
ganization and to the realities of human psy-
chology. We must know how much control is
wanted, and control over what, and through whom
it is to be exercised. We must decide whether
the demand is the passing result of abnormal eco-
nomic conditions, produced by the war and seized
upon by theorists as a basis for premature gen-
eralizations, or whether it represents a move-
ment which is so fundamental and permanent that
any future scheme of industrial relationships, un-
less it is to be built upon sand, must take account
of it.

The first condition of answering these questions
is an impartial survey of the actual facts as they
exist to-day. Mr. Carter Goodrich's book supplies
it. He is concerned not with theory, but with
practice. His object is not to propound any doc-
trine, to suggest any reforms or to formulate a
judgment as to the merits or demerits of any fea-
tures in the industrial system. It is simply to
offer the materials without the possession of
which these exercises, however exhilarating, are
apt to be sterile. He has set himself the question :
— "How much control over industry do the rank
and file of those who work in it, and their organi-
zations, in fact exercise?'* He answers it by an
analysis of industrial relationships, of the rules

X FOREWORD

enforced by trade unions and employers ' associa-
tions, of the varying conditions which together
constitute ''the custom of the trade" in each par-
ticular industry, and of the changes in all of these
which took place during the war.

Such a study of ''The Frontier of Control" is
indispensable to the formation of any reasonable
judgment upon the larger issues which the phrase
suggests. Mr. G-oodrich is well qualified to pro-
vide it. He has made a careful investigation of
such aspects of British industrial organization as
are relevant to his subject. Residence in Great
Britain has familiarized him with the atmosphere
in which its industrial politics are carried on. He
has mixed with members of Whitley Councils and
Boards of Control, Trade Boards and Royal Com-
missions, trade unions and employers' associa-
tions. He knows what men of business like Mr.
Foster and Mr. Malcolm Sparkes hope for the
building industries and the views on mining of
leading members of the Miners' Federation. To
the economic perplexities and agitations of a
foreign country he brings the wide background
of a student of economics and a dash of charming
skepticism which to one heated by the somewhat
feverish temperature of British industry during
the last two years, is as refreshing as the ice at
the close of an American dinner.

Mr. Goodrich has shown admirable self-

FOREWORD xi

restraint in allowing the facts to speak for them-
selves, and in resisting the temptation to enlarge
upon their moral. With regard to certain broad
questions, however, his book encourages the
reader to attempt the generalizations which the
author withholds. It suggests, in the first place,
that the sharp division ordinarily drawn between
the sphere of "management" and that of ** labor'*
is an abstraction which does less than justice to
the complexity of the facts. If it is broadly true
that in modern industry the function of the former
is direction and of the latter the execution of
orders transmitted to it, the line between them,
nevertheless, fluctuates widely from industry to in-
dustry. It varies, for one thing, quite irrespective
of any deliberate effort on the part of the workers
to move it, with the nature of the work which is
being carried on. There are certain occupations
in which an absolute separation between the plan-
ning and the performance of work is, for technical
reasons, impracticable. A group of miners who
are cutting and filling coal are "working" hard
enough. But very little coal will be cut, and the
risks of their trade wiU. be enormously increased,
unless they display some of the qualities of scien-
tific knowledge, prevision and initiative which are
usually associated with the word "management."
What is true of miners is true, in diiferent de-
grees, of men oa a building job or in the trans-

xil FOREWORD

port trades. They must exercise considerable
discretion in their work because, unless they do,
the work does not get done, and no amount of
supervision can compensate for the absence of it.
It is not, it may be suggestedj a mere chance that
workers in these industries should have taken the
initiative in the movement for ''control." They
demand more of it, because the very nature of
their work compels them to exercise something of
it already.

In industries such as these the character of the
work pushes the frontier of the workmen's con-
trol further into the employer's territory than is
the case in — say — a cotton mill or a locomotive
shop. But the degree to which workers exercise
in some industries functions and powers reserved
in others for the management does not depend
merely upon economic conditions. It is also, of
course, the result of conscious effort, which is not
the less significant because till recently it took the
form of specific claims to be consulted upon par-
ticular matters incidental to the wage contract and
was not related to any general social philosophy.
The organization of sufficient power to assert
those claims effectively is the history of trade
unionism. Of its result in establishing or failing
to establish them, Mr. Goodrich's book is the best
account known to me. The reader can judge from
it how much "control" had in practice been se-

FOREWORD xiii

cured by workmen up to 1919. If he compares tlie
position with that which obtained fifty years ago
he will see that long before the movement for
*' self-government in industry" had become ex-
plicit, the line between ''management" and
' * labor" had been, in fact, redrawn. On one point,
apprenticeship and the entry to a trade, the ef-
fective power of the workers appears for obvious
reasons to have diminished. On all the rest it has
enormously increased. As Mr. Groodrich's survey
shows, the intensive development of trade union-
ism has been even more remarkable than its ex-
tensive growth in membership. On the whole
group of questions, in particular, suggested by
the word ''discipline," it is every year more and
more succeeding in the establishment of the same
claims as it made effective thirty years ago with
regard to wages and hours.

In the light of the facts presented by Mr. Good-
rich it is a question whether the conventional
description of industrial organization given in
most economic text-books does not require a some-
what radical revision. The picture of "the em-
ployer" achieving economic progress by "substi-
tuting" one "factor of production" for another
may have been adequate to the early days of the
factory system. What the present study brings
out is the vital importance at every point of a
condition which is apt to be lightly touched upon

xiv FOREWORD

or omitted altogether, tlie condition of corporate
consent on the part of the workers. How vital
that condition is is one of the discoveries of
the past five years. It was emphasized first
by the events of the war, which revealed
how little reality there was in the common as-
sumption that the settlement of the larger ques-
tions of industrial organization was a matter for
the employer and the employer alone. It became
necessary to reorganize industry for the purpose
of increasing production or of economizing mate-
rials. The condition of carrying out the reorgani-
zation effectively was the consent of all engaged
in the industry. Consent could be obtained only
by a formal recognition of the fact that the rep-
resentative of the workers had a right to be con-
sulted with regard to questions of policy and
management, because they possessed de facto the
power to frustrate the required changes or to
make them effective. Hence, as Mr. Goodrich
points out, the creation of representative organs,
such as the Textile Control Boards, through
which the views of the workers on these matters
could be expressed. When, as in the textile
trades, that representative machinery worked
effectively, the emergency was met with compara-
tively little difficulty. When, as in the engineer-
ing trades, the policy pursued was to force drastic
innovations upon workers who were not consulted

FOREWORD XV

with regard to them, the result was endless fric-
tion. The moral suggested by the situation since
the armistice in the building and coal-mining in-
dustries— to mention no others — and emphasized
by Mr. Foster's Committee, by Mr. Justice
Sankey, and by the report on dock labor of Lord
Shaw's Court of Inquiry, is the same. It is
that, as matters now stand, the first condition
of economic progress is such a change in the posi-
tion of the workers as will throw on to the side
of increased efficiency the public opinion which is
at present skeptical both of the objects for which
it is urged and of the methods by which it is
sought to attain it.

The truth is that, with the pushing forward of
the ''frontier" through the process described by
Mr. Goodrich, the conditions of industrial effi-
ciency have changed. In no very remote past disci-
pline could be imposed upon workers from above,
under pain of dismissal, which meant in the last
resort, however hateful it may be to confess it,
by an appeal to hunger and fear. "Members of
this Court," states Lord Shaw's report, ''can re-
call a period when men, gathered at the dock gates,
fought fiercely for a tally which, when obtained,
might only enable them to obtain one hour's work,
and so limit their earnings for the day to 4d."
Workmen were conscious of individual grievances,
but they had not formulated an interpretation of

xvi FOREWORD

their position in general terms, and the willing-
ness of the personnel of industry to co-operate in
production without raising fundamental questions
as to its constitution and government could be
taken for granted. To-day that assumption is
possible only to the very short-sighted. As the
present study shows, the effect of the piecemeal
advances made by trade unionism has been to
effect, in the aggregate, a radical redistribution
of authority between the parties engaged in in-
dustry, which results, in extreme cases, in some-
thing like a balance of power. To discuss how
that situation is to be resolved, whether by a
frontal attack on trade unionism, such as appears
to be favored by the more naive and irresponsi-
ble section of opinion in the United States, or
by giving it a vested interest in the con-
tinuance of profit-making through schemes of
profit-sharing and representation on directorates,
or by a partnership between a trade unionism
undertaking responsibility for the maintenance of
professional standards and the consumer for whom
industry is carried on, does not fall within the
scope of Mr. Goodrich's book. But a reasonable
consideration of these large and burning issues
will be materially assisted by the clearness and
impartiality with which he has set forth the pre-
cise facts of the existing situation.

R. H. Tawney.

THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

INTRODUCTION

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL

''In the past workmen have thought that if they
could secure higher wages and better conditions
they would be content. Employers have thought
that if they granted these things the workers
ought to be contented. Wages and conditions
have been improved; but the discontent and the
unrest have not disappeared. ' ' So far the quota-
tion might be from almost any American business
man. But the place was the King's Robing Room
of the British House of Lords, and the speaker was
a veteran trade union leader, Mr. William Straker,
presenting the case of the Miners' Federation
before the Coal Commission which was sitting in
judgment on Great Britain's key industry. Mr.
Straker went on: — **Many good people have come
to the conclusion that working people are so un-
reasonable that it is useless trying to satisfy
them. The fact is that the unrest is deeper than
pounds, shillings and pence, necessary as they
are. The root of the matter is the straining of
the spirit of man to be free."

In the name of this ** deeper" unrest, the
Miners ' Federation was demanding a bold scheme

8

4 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

of workers' control. And the "deeper" unrest
itself — or at least the unrest which is concerned
more with discipline and management than with
wages — is often spoken of as the demand for con-
trol. The main business of this book is to discuss
the facts of the present extent of workers ' control
in British industry; the purpose of the introduc-
tion is to indicate the significant setting of these
facts in the human terms of the demand for con-
trol. Control is important only because people
want it.

But how many workers do want control, and
how much control do they want? No answer can
pretend to be definite. Control is a slogan in
several vigorous propagandist programs. Con-
trol has more than once been a definite issue both
in the active conflicts and the formulated policies
of the labor movement. But even for this con-
scions and organized demand, no accurate count
of heads can be made. And for the much more
significant estimate of the underlying demand for
control — the desires of individual workers for
the simpler things that are grouped as control,
and the restlessnesses for which the word control
is an attempted rationalization — it is possible only
to offer a few clues for further study.

Control is the central idea of various propa-
gandist isms. The Syndicalist cry of 1911 —
"The Mines for the Miners" — has died out, but

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 5

the idea of workers' control remains. ** Complete
control of industry by the working-class organiza-
tions," is the slogan of the Marxian Industrial
Unionists/ Control of industry by guilds of pro-
ducers co-operating with a democratized state
representing the people as consumers, is the
subtler syndicalism ^ of the Guild Socialists. And
the cries of '^complete control" and ''encroaching
control" of these groups of theorists are echoed
more and more faintly through various grades of
opinion to the "share in control" and ''voice
in control" ^ offered in the Whitley Councils. The
thoroughgoing disciples of either of the two com-
plete gospels of control — Marxian Industrial
Unionism and Guild Socialism — are a tiny
minority. The Socialist Labor Party, the chief
organization of the former, has about two
thousand members, but this number included the
ablest of the leaders of the shop stewards ' move-
ment, and the movement served as a channel for
the doctrine. The Centfal Labor College, which
"promises to be candid but not impartial" and
preaches an uncompromising revolutionary
orthodoxy, reaches through its correspondence
and other courses perhaps ten thousand students a
year — chiefly among the members of the National

* G. D. H. Cole, An Introduction to Trade Unionism, pp. 97, 98.

* Cf. the footnote on p. 37 of Cole's Self-Oovernment in Industry.

* The corresponding Americanisms are " management-sharing "
and " voice in management."

6 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Union of Railwaymen and the South Wales
Miners' Federation. The Guild Socialists, too,
are insignificant in enrolled members. The Na-
tional Guilds League, their propagandist body, has
less than a thousand members. This figure is,
however, little indication of the actual number
who accept more or less fully the guild idea and
little indication of the actual influence of this small
group — composed as it is largely of able and pro-
lific writers and of the younger trade union
officials. The working-class circulation of Mr.
Cole's books, his personal influence as adviser to
the labor movement, and the obvious guildsman's
hand in documents such as the Miners' Bill for
Nationalization* and the Foster Report to the
Building Trades Parliament "—are suggestions of
this. One shrewd observer declared that: —

"The Guild Socialist propaganda has gone as far in
the trade union movement in two years as the State
Socialist propaganda had gone in twenty years."

In addition to these elaborate and definite
theories of control there is a large body of opin-
ion that is agreed on some extension of workers*
control as the next step in trade unionism. No
trade union leader would admit that he wanted
less control than the minimum offered in the
Whitley Councils scheme — which is itself some in-
ication of the spread of the control doctrine.

* See below, p. 12.

• See below, p. 86.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 7

There is no one break in the long series from
Syndicalism to Whitleyism, and the widespread
acceptance of the latter in middle-class thinking is
a hint of the driving force of the more drastic
doctrines. Next possibly to ''nationalization,"
** control" is the most talked-of word among trade
union theorists.

The control issue, moreover, has passed from
labor theory into labor activity and declared pol-
icy. Its most spectacular expression was in that
revolt against or within trade unionism known as
the Shop Stewards' Movement." This, it is true,
was many things besides an expression of the de-
mand for control. It began largely as a protest
against the special helplessness of the trade imion
leaders before the special war-time problems. The
cost of living was rising sharply, dilution was
threatening the wage standard of the skilled engi-
neers,'' the number of war-time restrictions was
multiplying. Meanwhile the trade union leaders
were bound not to lead strikes — first by the "in-
dustrial truce" agreed upon at the beginning of
the war, later by the anti-strike provisions of the
Munitions Act. The unrest broke out in spontane-
ous and unauthorized strikes. The movement
found leaders in the shop stewards or trade union
representatives from within the various shops'

• G. D. H. Cole, Introduction to Trade Unionitm, pp. 53-58.

* See below, pp. 100 and 189.

8 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

men whose position before the war had meant
little more than collecting dues for the union.*
The issues were concrete and immediate. The first
of these strikes was the ''Tuppenny Strike" for a
long-delayed wage increase on the Clyde in Jan-
uary, 1915. The strike committee of stewards
elected from the various works organized per-
manently as the Clyde Workers' Committee and
this simple type of structure was copied by other
districts. The movement at Sheffield broke out
when a certain skilled engineer was drafted into
the army. And so through the other engineering
centers. The movement was first and most simply
the workers' attempt by whatever means came
handy to get the inmaediate concessions which
their official machinery was failing to win. It
became in part, however, a revolt against official-
ism in general. This in fact furnished the chief
dogma of the movement — "the vesting of control
of policy in the rank and file" — and its common
name, the "Rank and File Movement." "Refer
grievances to the rank and file," and "Get a move
on in the shop before reporting to official sources, ' '
are rules from the Sheffield Shop Stewards ' Man-
ual. The movement was largely a breaking away
from the cumbrous structure of engineering trade
unionism. "We organize for power," wrote the

• Ministry of Labour, Works Committees, pp. 2-10, See Note
on Sources.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 9

chief spokesman of the movement,^ *'and yet we
find the workers in the workshop divided not only
amongst a score of branches but a score of
unions." Shop vs. branch and mditstry vs.
craft, were the two issues of organization. The
trade union branch in engineering is based on the
residence, not the working-place, of the mem-
bers. Men who work side by side may be
scattered among a number of branches. But
grievances arise in particular shops. Therefore
''Direct Representation from the Workshops to
the Committees" is the first of the ''Principles"
on the member's card of the Sheffield Workers*
Committee. In the second place, the industry is
organized in a score or more of separate and often
competing trade unions.^" Jealousy frequently
runs high between craft and craft and higher be-
tween skilled and unskilled. The shop stewards '
movement took in all grades of labor and was in
effect an amalgamation from below. "Work
always for the solidarity of all the workers," is
the last rule from the Shop Stewards' Manual.
The movement was, then, a double attempt to fit
the structure of the labor movement to the struc-
ture of the industrial unit.
So much for the motives other than the demand

• J. T. Murphy, The Workers' Committee. See Note on Sources.
'• Eight of these unions, including the Amalgamated Society of
Engineers, have just voted to unite.

10 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

for control. The movement won its chief support
by appeals to simple and very practical war-time
issues ; its chief effect may possibly be in the field
of trade union structure. But its connections
with the demand for workers' control are close
and highly significant. Whatever the rank and
file wanted, the conspicuous leaders were out for
control. This is evident in all the propaganda of
the movement. The first of the ** Objects" on the
Shefiield member's card was **To obtain an ever-
increasing Control of Workshop Conditions." It
is evident in such by-products of the movement as
the Clyde Dilution Scheme " and the Gallecher-
Paton memorandum on collective contract.^^ But
it is clearest of all in the actual seizures of power
by the shop stewards and in the way the leaders
played on each particular grievance and played
up each particular issue to swell the general de-
mand for control. Several instances of shop
steward tactics are given in Section X. The use
of a particular blacksmith's objection to the boss's
watching his fire to establish a general refusal
to be watched at work is a minor but typical case."
Moreover the very changes in structure themselves
were often argued on control grounds: fit your
organization to industry to make it fit to control
industry. The shop stewards' movement was a

'» See below, pp. 197-201.
" See below, p. 173.
" See below, p. 138.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 11

genuine movement towards the control of industry.
And as an object-lesson in control it has become
a stimulus to further demands. The powers won
by the shop stewards are being used up and down
the country as a text for vigorous propaganda.
The shop stewards' control was decidedly con-
tagious control "; its actual extent may be easily
underrated by an outsider. It was recorded in no
formal agreements. It rested on the war shortage
of labor and was abruptly checked in the period
of unemployment that followed the end of the
war. The full story has nowhere been put to-
gether, and the evidence must be pieced out from
th6 accounts of the shop stewards themselves and
from employers' tales of "what they had to put
up with during the war," but it is clear that the
movement was enormously powerful throughout
the great engineering centers and that it has
spread to other industries, and it is clear that in
certain works the shop stewards exercised the
greatest degree of control ever held by British
workers in modern industry. The shop stewards'
movement was both an expression of the demand
for control and an incitement to further demands.
But the demand for control is by no means con-
fined to ' ' rebel ' ' trade unionism. The demand that
among the engineers broke through the union
machinery has in other unions found its outlet in

" See below, Section XIX.

12 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

oflScial programs. Its expressions in official trade
union policy have been less picturesque than the
unofficial outbreak, but they are no less signifi-
cant. Two of the greatest trade unions, the
Miners ' Federation with its 800,000 members and
the National Union of Railwaymen with its 450,-
000, have not only accepted the principle of con-
trol but have put forward specific schemes of con-
trol as serious parts of their programs. At the
annual conference of the Miners on July 9, 1918,
the following resolution was carried: —

"That in the opinion of this conference the time
has arrived in the history of the coal mining industry
when it is clearly in the national interests to transfer
the entire industry from private ownership and control
to State ownership with joint control and administror
tion hy the workmen and the State" (italics mine).

* ' The workmen should have some directive power
in the industry in which they are engaged," said
Mr. Frank Hodges in urging the resolution. **I
do not believe that nationalization will do any good
for anybody, unless it is accompanied by an effec-
tive form of working-class control." Another
leader declared: — **We have the brains amongst
the miners to work the mines." The sense of this
resolution was embodied in a Mines Nationaliza-
tion Bill" which was drafted early in 1919 and

" See below, Note on Sources.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 13

presented to the Coal Commission. Under this
scheme the industry would be administered, under
a Minister of Mines, by a National Council made
up of ten Government nominees and ten men
chosen by the Miners' Federation and by a series
of subordinate District and Pit Councils on each
of which one half of the members should be di-
rectly elected by the workers affected. The system
of control outlined in the majority report of the
Coal Commission, known as the Sankey Scheme,^*
differs from this in the important particular that
on each of these boards the workers are given
slightly less than half of the places. The repre-
sentatives of the Miners nevertheless accepted the
Sankey Report with minor reservations. After
the Government rejected it, it was endorsed by an
overwhelming majority at the Trades Union Con-
gress at Glasgow and is now the subject of vigor-
ous propaganda on the part of the entire trade
union movement.

The National Union of Railwaymen was first
committed to a control policy by the following
resolution passed by a National Conference of
District Councils early in 1917: —

"That this Conference, seeing that the Railways are
being controlled by the State for the benefit of the
nation during the war, is of opinion that they should
not revert to private ownership afterwards. Further,

" See below. Note on Sources.

U THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

we believe that national welfare demands that they
should be acquired by the State to be jointly controlled
and managed by the State and representatives of the
N.U.R."

Mr. Bellamy in his President's address that year
declared : —

"Whether nationalization or [state] control be de-
cided upon, it ought to be made unmistakably clear
that neither system will be acceptable to railwaymen
unless we are given a share in the management."

A special conference in November, 1917, voted by
a majority of 74 to 1 : —

"That there should be equal representation, both na-
tional and local, for this union upon the management
of all railways in the United Kingdom."

In March, 1918, the Executive at a special meet-
ing adopted a control scheme similar to that of
the Miners and providing for a National Board of
Control, half of whose members should be elected
by the House of Commons and half by the railway
trade unions. The scheme is now under negotia-
tion with the Prime Minister and the Minister of
Transport. The Government's counter offer seems
to be an improvement in the Conciliation Board
machinery — to allow for the hearing of grievances
over discipline — and a small minority of places
for the union on the Railway Executive Committee.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 15

The Miners and Railwaymen, then, have put con-
trol schemes into their official programs and have
pressed them in their actual bargaining. The
other unions have no such detailed proposals as
parts of their serious immediate policy, but it
would be easy to fill a book with statements from
trade union journals and from responsible trade
union officials that the control of industry is their
** ultimate aim." The Postal and Telegraph
Clerks,^' whose leaders are all National Guilds-
men, are definitely committed to a control policy.
The following bit from a correspondent's letter
is a fair sample of the tone of their official publi-
cation : —

"I am out for a Postal Guild; so is Francis. He
wouldn't be worth a dime ... if he wasn't."

But it is unnecessary to go down the list of
individual unions to discover commitments of the
trade union movement to the idea of control. The
issue came before the 1'rades Union Congress at
Glasgow in September, 1919. Mr. Bromley of
the Locomotive Engineers moved a resolution
favoring workers' control of industry to end ex-
ploitation. The motion was carried unanimously
and with some enthusiasm. Control has become
an official and avowed aim of the whole labor
movement.

" Now a part of the new Union of Post Office Workers.

16 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

How mucli this commitment really means is
another matter, A resolution carried unanimously
and without debate at a Congress whose real
interest was in the hot jfight over ** Direct Action"
is hardly evidence of immediate responsible
policy. But together with the other commitments
to control, it is a significant sign of the times. It
is at least a sign of the phenomenally rapid growth
of the demand for control. In 1907, the leaders of
the railwaymen declared in all honesty that they
had no intention of having anything to do with
discipline. In 1919, the railway unions are nego-
tiating on the basis of a demand for half control
of the entire management. This is partly a matter
of the increased power of the union; a union's
strength may be roughly gauged by the issues on
which it fights. But it is largely a matter of a
change in the ideas of the trade union movement.
The demand for ''control of industry" in so
many words is a new thing or possibly the revival
of a long-forgotten thing. Bits of what would now
be called control have long been fought for and
often w«n by the trade unions — of that this whole
book is evidence. But the conscious demand is
a new and significant phenomenon. The very
vocabulary. of control is new. It had hardly been
heard before Mr. Tom Mann '' stumped England

" A leader in the great dock strike of 1889, mass orator to
three continents, now General Secretary of the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers,

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 17

in 1911. All the movements discussed have
started since that time. Eight years of propa-
ganda at the most and a new and revolutionary-
idea officially accepted by the trade union move-
ment.

The resolution indicates one more thing — that
there is within trade unionism practically no
active opposition to the idea of control. There
is no doubt at all of the truth of Mr. Cole's claim
in the Introduction of Trade Unionism that the
theorists of control are in line with the immediate
tendencies of the ** younger active trade union-
ists." But just here must be made the first
serious discount of the force of the demand.
Younger active trade unionists are by any
count a mere handful. The percentage of
members interested in general policy is small
in any union. *'I sometimes feel," said Mr.
Hodges, ''that there is a great mountain of
indifference even in the Mining Movement."
Younger active trade unions are perhaps also a
minority. Few unions have both the power and
the desire to push forward programs of control.
Many must be written off almost completely in
any calculation of the demand. The great cotton
unions have hardly been touched by the control
propaganda. The aristocratic monopolists of the
old crafts discussed in Section XIX make no part
of the new demand. The women's unions have

18 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

showed little effective demand for control — so far
at least dilution by woman labor has been also a
dilution of the demand for control. All this is
not to minimize the demand. Control has been
genuinely fought for in trade union activity. The
idea of control has officially captured the trade
union movement. But to say that the trade union
movement is committed to control by a resolution
passed unanimously at Glasgow is not to say that
control is actively demanded by each of the five
and a quarter million trade unionists represented
at the Congress. Nor is it to say that every trade
union represented will fight for control. Trade
unionism is no such coherent and united force.

Nor is control so simple and definite a thing.
The word is a slogan and a convenient general
term. But in actual reference to the facts of in-
dustry it breaks up into a bewildering variety of
rights and claims — as the rest of the book will
show. Control is no ''simple central objective,"
no one clear-cut thing which people either know
they want or know they don't want. The demand
cannot be put glibly into a single phrase or a
single resolution — too many diverse motives are
blended and crossed in the strivings of many
workers for the complicated set of things called
control.

The demand for control is not the unified ex-

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 19

pression of some single specific impulse. If it
were, it might be easier to separate it from the
other strands of motive in industrial life. But
instead, the elements of the demand must be
hunted for in the whole jungle of the reactions of
workers to the industrial situation. It is a hunt
for facts that can neither be classified sharply nor
weighed accurately. * ' It is essential, ' ' says the re-
port of the Garton Foundation," '*to disentangle
as far as possible the economic and non-economic
factors. ' ' That would be hard enough, but would
lead only to the edge of the problem of distinguish-
ing among the non-economic factors. It is a study
to which there is no end, but even the most tenta-
tive beginning may fill in some of the human con-
tent of the phrases of control. What are some of
the wants and feelings on which the propaganda
is based?

A start might be made by setting down a few
general heads under which to group the workers*
feelings about industry. The worker's interests
in industry are roughly these ; —

(1) How much he gets — Wages, etc.

(2) What it's for— The Object of the Work.

(3) How he's treated — ^Freedom and Author-
ity.

(4) What he actually does — ^Workmanship.
To put these down in a row is not to pretend that

" See Note on Sources.

20 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

they are equal or even sharply distinct, but the
classification will serve as a tool in the examina-
tion and comparison of some of the elements in
the demand for control. The first two sets of
interests are concerned with the consumption of
the products of industry, the others with the con-
ditions of production. The third and fourth in-
terests fit closely the issues of discipline and
management which are the frontier of control.
The first and second apparently bear less directly
on the personal and technical organization of pro-
duction. But no serious study could ignore the
cross-relationships between all four sets of mo-
tives.

How much the worker gets — in wages, hours
of leisure, etc. — is of course the chief field of trade
union activity.^" The immediate bargain for hours
and wages is ruled out of the subsequent descrip-
tions of the extent of control. But most of the
complicated forms of control are themselves
merely elaborate safeguards of the standard of
living. Most of the control already won by the
workers is control as a bulwark of wages. The
checkweighman is there to see that wages are

'" The annual official Reports on Strikes and Lockouts give
figures of the numbers of workpeople involved in disputes and
a classification of the disputes according to the issues involved.
According to these, 64 per cent of the workpeople out in the
years 1901-13 were out over (question of wages and hours. See
Note on Sources.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 21

not nibbled away by fraud.^^ Apprenticeship and
similar restrictions are frankly for purposes of
wage monopoly." The constitution of the Amal-
gamated Society of Engineers talks of the "vested
interest" in craft rights. Consultation over
changes in technique is mainly an outgrowth of
the piece-rate bargain.^' It is only a slight exag-
geration to say that all present forms of workers'
control, except those that secure the rudiments of
decency in discipline, are by-products of the
wages-and-hours struggle.

The wage element is the dominant factor in
present-day control. But what are its bearings on
the demands for more control? There are at least
three widely different interrelations to be noticed.
The first and most talked-of is opposition. The
average workman, it is often said, is interested in
"mere wages." ^* He cares nothing about con-
trol; he doesn't want to run things. What he
wants is to draw his pay regularly and get away
as quickly as possible. Nor is this merely an

"Section XI.

" Section V.

" Section XIV.

" I do not intend the phrase "mere wages" to carry any moral
stigma. It is not argued that it is sordid or immoral to want
wages and short hours and a steady job, and gloriously moral to
want control and personal dignity and an interesting task. Nor
is it argued that it is natural and healthy for men to want money
and decent ventilation, but unnatural and sentimental for them
to desire freedom and joy in work. The question is not what
people should want but the sufficiently difficult one of what people
do want.

22 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

employer's view of working-class psychology. I
heard it also from an impatient leader of shop
stewards who said that most workmen were **not
interested beyond wages and hours" and that
therefore he *'had no intention of waiting for the
majority." It is true that the wage and control
movements are sometimes in competition, and no
doubt on a straight vote between wages and con-
trol wages would still win.

But it is a great mistake to suppose that the
two interests are always or even usually in opposi-
tion. The short-run economic interest — what R.
F. Hoxie called the demand for ''more now" — is
indifferent to control movements. The longer-run
economic demands — which take shape in the plan-
ning of drastic changes in the distribution of
wealth — may on the other hand be found greatly
strengthening the demand for workers' control.
In fact, the latter form a major part of the driv-
ing force of current control movements. The shop
stewards are emphatic on this point. ''What we
want," a Sheffield leader told me promptly, "is
the product of the industry, and" — after hesitat-
ing a moment — "conditions," by which he meant
chiefly protection from trade diseases. Mr. Frank
Hodges of the Miners has been perhaps the
clearest of all labor leaders in his insistence on
the need for control as an "avenue for great" —
and non-economic — "longings." Yet he too de-

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 23

clares that the control demand is mainly one for
satisfactions outside working hours: —

"Workers' control is a means, and not an end.
Work in the modern industrial world is unpleasant
for the majority of workers. They will find their ex-
pression as human beings outside the working hours.
. . . Control they will use to get efficient manage-
ment and machinery. . . . Control they wish to save
them from the waste and insecurity and long hours
of the present system . . . which leaves no secure
and creative leisure. . . . But control will never of
itself be an answer to the instincts thwarted by stan-
dardized machine industry. The answer will be found
outside working hours. ' ' ^'

The demand for high pay may strengthen tlio
demand for control. The desire for sure pay —
for security against unemployment — is even
nearer the surface of control schemes. This is in
fact the chief immediate appeal to the workers of
such an elaborate plan of control as the Foster
Report.^* Indeed, several working-class students
have told me that the desire for security is the
chief factor in the demand for control. Both
security and high wages might conceivably be
won without workers' control, but the demands
for them furnish much of the impetus of current
movements toward control.

Quoted by Arthur Gleason, What the Workers Want.
See below, p. 86. And cf. all of Section IV.

24. THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

There is still a third interrelation between the
wage motive and the ''non-economic factors" in
the demand for control. What starts as a wage
demand may easily — often unconsciously — ^be
colored by an admixture of other motives. The
clearest case is the transition in motive from
wages to workmanship to be discussed in Section
XV. Every demand on the part of the Miners for
improved technique has had as its basis the effect
of bad management on piece-work earnings. The
first and obvious motive was wages. Yet a large
part of the feeling with which I have heard indi-
vidual miners talk about needed improvements
was clearly — whether they knew it or not — a sheer
workmanlike disgust at inefificiency. And at the
Miners' Conference on output committees, held
in November, 1916, the Yorkshire leader, Mr. Her-
bert Smith, declared: —

"I say it has nothing to do with it . . . whether
a man gets 15 shillings or 20 shillings . . . oppor-
tunity must be given . . . to get as many tubs as
possible."

The strictly economic motives, then, are found
both opposing and greatly strengthening, and oc-
casionally even passing bodily over into, the non-
economic factors in the demand for control.
Clearly they are not the whole demand, but any
estimate of the future of the demand is worthless

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 25

if it does not consider on which side their great
weight is likely to fail.

Certain of the motives centering around the
object for which the work is done or the purpose
for which the product is to be used — what it's for
and for whose benefit — have a bearing on control.
The good economic man, it is true, in an imper-
sonal economic system cares for none of these
things. But actual workers sometimes do. The
patriotic motive made a difference in war-time pro-
duction. Moreover workers sometimes refuse to
do certain pieces of work because they disagree
with the purposes of it: — the Sailors' Union dur-
ing the war would not carry delegates to the
Stockholm International Labor Conference;
more recently certain trade unionists have refused
to make munitions for the Russian Campaign.
More to the present point is the extent to which the
control demand is fortified by the objection to
working for private profit. The organization of
industry is right enough as it is, one shop steward
told me, what we want is to eliminate private
ownership. The Foster Report names as one of
four causes of restriction of output, *'the disin-
clination of the workmen to make unlimited profit
for private employers. " " We don 't want to work
any longer for private profit, ' ' was the burden of
the Miners' case before the Coal Commission.

26 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

That this was more than a wage matter and clearly-
bound up with state socialist or community feel-
ing, comes out clearly in a passage in the cross-
examination of Mr. Straker of the Northumber-
land Miners by Mr. Cooper of the Northumber-
land Coalowners: —

"Mr. Straker. . . . He [the miner] objects to those
profits being collected by any few individuals.

Mr. Cooper. What possible difference can it make
to him whether the profits are colleeted by few or
many, or by a neutral body like the State, so long
as he gets his fair share?

Mr. Straker. Because he is realizing now that he
is a citizen of the State."

The feeling is evidently in part that the status
of "public servant" is somehow honorable in it-
self. It is no accident that the two strongest official
trade union movements toward control — those of
the Miners ' Federation and the National Union of
Railwayman — are for "nationalization and joint
control. ' ' There is no doubt that the older social-
ist feeling is a powerful element in the control
demand. One careful working class student, in
defining the essence of the demand for control,
said that it was: "To serve the community, not
a man and a class." The blending is not logically
necessary. Socialist Utopias have been planned
with no thought of workers ' control. The interest
in what happens to the product of industry does

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 27

not necessarily involve an interest in the internal
control of the production. But in the ideas of
the British labor movement, at least, these two
sets of motives are inextricably mingled. When
Mr. Straker says that the miner must ''feel that
the industry is being run by him in order to pro-
duce coal for the use of the community/' it would
be hard for him to say where the one motive ends
and the other begins.

How the worker is treated — what sort of author-
ity he is under, how much freedom he is allowed,
how much authority he has — on these questions the
demand for control becomes most nearly a de-
mand for control for control's sake. ''The con-
flict of interests between employers and employed
in private industry has two aspects," writes Mr.
Henry Clay in the Observer, "the purely economic
aspect of wages, and the moral aspect of subor-
dination to discipline." There is no lack of
testimony to the importance of the discipline as-
pect in present-day labor feeling. Self-respect,
status, independence, personal freedom, personal
dignity, — a whole propaganda literature and a
whole set of commentaries on labor have been
written around these terms. And the roots of
this sort of feeling run far back into the older
trade unionism. Trade union membership, says
the constitution of the Friendly Society of Iron-

28 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

founders, ' ' enables men to exhibit the principle of
self-respect which, if duly exercised, will in its
turn command the respect of others, thereby plac-
ing a man in that position where he may demand
that he should be treated as a factor in any
arrangement involving his services, and not as
though he was a mere human machine." A re-
cent account of a dispute carried on by the shop
stewards at a Cowes aircraft factory runs in al-
most the same terms: —

"A mass-meeting of all sections made it quite clear
that they were going to insist that any attempt to treat
any group of men without regard to their feelings or
self-respect would be treated as a challenge to all the
unions. ' '

Lord Robert Cecil put the case to the House of
Commons in the phrases of political theory: —

"What is really the position of the wage-earner in
most industries? He is paid so much wages. He is a
mere item. He has to carry out a certain industrial
policy on which he has never been consulted, and with
which he has no power of dealing at all. He is not
really a free, self-governing man in industrial matters.
... It [this feeling] is really at the bottom of this

claim for nationalization."

I

Professor Edwin Cannan put the same claim into
homelier language in his testimony before the
Coal Commission : —

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 29

* * It is all right to work with anyone ; what is disagree-
able is to feel too distinctly that you are working under
someone. You suffer from this feeling when you are
told to do what you know, or think you know, to be the
wrong thing, and also when you are told to do the right
thing in a disagreeable manner."

Dr. Cannan's shrewd analysis makes a good
beginning for an attempt to separate out the ele-
ments of the freedom-authority demand. The
most conspicuous is surely the objection to be-
ing told in a disagreeable manner, to being told
the wrong way. It is just this that the "Welsh
colliers and the railwaymen and the other workers
described in Section X are ''quick to resent."
Being told the wrong way is almost an exact trans-
lation of "alleged harassing conduct of a fore-
man," and the great number of disputes on this
head is a sign of the strength of the feeling. The
aircraft-workers already quoted were demanding
' ' the right to work under a manager who will real-
ize that men are men inside the shop, and not
servile slaves." Similar evidence of the intensity
of this resentment against harsh discipline may
be taken from a writer whose sympathies are
entirely on the employers' side. The author of
The Mam^Power of the Nation " is warning fore-
men of "The Pitfalls of the Promoted":—

" See Note on Sources.

30 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

"Domination, even when veneered by a display of
sympathy, tends to active guardianship of privileges
cherished by the worker and the exercise of that will-
fulness which finds expression too often in an enforce-
ment of selfish rights. In fact, were one to probe
deeply into the basal cause of many disputes in works,
it would be found that in a large number of cases a
little thoughtfulness and tact on the part of the fore-
man would have nipped the trouble in the bud."

There is no doubt at all that irritation at ''petty
tyranny or constant bullying" is '*at the bottom
of some of the bitterest strikes."

All these hot protests against particular abuses
of authority are perhaps not yet a demand for con-
trol. There is certainly a distinction between the
resentment against being controlled in a certain
way and the resentment against being controlled
at all. But even more significant than the distinc-
tion is the fact that the one passes so readily over
into the other. The objection to being ''messed
about" by an unusually fussy foreman becomes an
objection to being "messed about" by any sort of
supervision. The fierce resentment against ill-
treatment by a particular "gafiFer" or boss
crystallizes into the general phrases "sack the
gaffer" or "eliminate the bosses." Resentment
at being given orders in a disagreeable manner be-
comes, as Cannan suggests, the general resent-
ment at feeling too distinctly under orders at all.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 31

Much of the touchiness of the workers toward the
display of authority comes very near to resent-
ment against all control. *'The British attitude,"
said the secretary of a powerful employers' asso-
ciation, '*is this : — I know how to do my job and
won't be told how." ** Policing" is pretty
generally resented. And sometimes the objection
is put rigorously into practice, as in the case of
the Scottish miners who refuse to work while the
overman is in their stall ^® or of the Clyde black-
smiths who would not let their managing director
watch their jfires.^" All this is not the demand for
control in the sense of an explicit theory of opposi-
tion to authority and only a small minority of the
workers hold any such complete theory. But this
resentment may easily be the ** makings" of such
a demand. One of the shop stewards declared
vehemently : —

"People talk as if the demand for control was some-
thing that had to be created among the workers by a
slow process, hut it's there already!"

He must surely have meant, however, that it was
"there" in the shape of a latent resentment that
might be focused on this or that particular issue,
not * * there " as a fully conscious program. There
is some evidence, too, of the workings of this pro-
cess by which irritation with certain orders be-

" See below, p. 187.
" See below, p. 138,

32 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

comes a resentment against all control. A York-
shire carpenter gave me a theory to account for
the war-time increase in the control demand which
illustrates this in detail: — Work before the war
went along much the same way from year to
year, and few new orders had to be given. There
was nothing to make the workers especially con-
scious that they were under control. The rapid
war changes made necessary a sudden stream of
novel and disturbing and often conflicting orders.
All this made the workers feel themselves more
distinctly bossed, and therefore ready to think
in terms of opposition to control. The intellectual
history of one of the prominent Clyde shop
stewards has run a somewhat similar course. Be-
fore he had any particular social theories he used
to resent being watched at his work. When the
manager brought guests through the shop he used
to switch off the power and walk away from his
machine — ''bad enough to have to work in a fac-
tory anyhow without being put on exhibition do-
ing it ! " It was this sensitiveness to all subordi-
nation which became the basis for his later revolu-
tionary theories ; and it is this, he claims, which is
the real driving force in the minds of the leaders
of the extremist movements. The sensitiveness of
those who always ''feel too distinctly" that they
are under someone is very near the core of the
conscious theories of control. The feeling of

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 33

servility in subordination to the employer's
authority is the leading note in shop steward prop-
aganda. This is what makes the bitterness that
runs through Mr. J. T. Murphy's pamphlets: —

"Why are men and women servile^to directors, man-
agers, and foremen? Why do men dodge behind ma-
chines and in lavatories to smoke while the employers
can and do stroll through the shops smoking cigars?
. . . Why do men and women work long hours and
show all the characteristics of subjection to the em-
ployers if the latter do not possess a power over them?
. . . The workers show all the characteristics of a sub-
ject people when in contact with the employers."^"

Mr. Straker is a labor leader of quite different
temper, but the same feeling of resentment that
the worker should be ** merely at the will or direc-
tion of another being" " appears again and again
in his testimony before the Coal Commission. The
following passage is typical: —

"Q. I notice that you lay considerable stress in your
precis upon this idea that under the pre-war system the
workmen were in what they called a servile position : do
you really seriously put that forward?

Mr. Straker. I do. . . . It is always a servile posi-
tion when men are almost entirely under the control of
another. " '*

•* Compromise or Independence? See Note on Sources.
" Coal Commission Evidence, Question 23116. See Note on
Sources.
" Questions 23433, 23434.

34 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

A resentment against the whole system of con-
trol in industry, a resentment constantly fed by
irritation at particular cases of clumsily-exercised
control, is a genuine and distinct factor in the
demands of labor.

It may still be pointed out that all this is merely
a negative resentment against control and not
specifically a positive demand for control. This
distinction may seem like an attempt to cut be-
tween things never separated in practice, but it
is not merely a quibble. The desire to be let alone,
to be free from the irksomeness of control by
others, is not identical with the desire to co-oper-
ate actively in the work of controlling. The ''will
to be responsible for oneself" does not automati-
cally resolve itself into the will to take part in
representative government. The question of how
far and under what conditions the one passes over
into the other is a highly important practical point.
Men might be ungovernable by authority without
being thereby ready to govern themselves.

The demand for personal freedom within in-
dustry is not identical with the demand for
political power within industry ; the one begins as
a desire for no government, the other is a desire
for a share in self-government. How much of the
latter is there in the present-day control demand?
Clearly it is a less vocal part. The roots and
beginnings of the control demand are in the felt

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 35

irksomeness of the present system of control, not
in a conscious desire for a new field of activity. I
heard a group of Derbyshire miners thrashing out
the problem. *' Supervision is nauseous." On
that they heartily agreed. ''But supervision is
necessary." Yes, if only for safety. Then one of
the men suggested that there might be another
sort of supervision — ''amicable discipline" he
called it — in which the supervisors should be
elected by and responsible to the workers. It is
apparently in some such way as this that the
positive demand arises. Mr. Frank Hodges is
almost alone in putting the demand for responsi-
bility— for the ' ' daily exercise of directive ability"
— in the forefront of the claim for control. Little
direct evidence of the reality of this demand can
be taken from industry itself. What interest the
ordinary workman may have had in running things
or in managing men has had to be satisfied out-
side of industry if at all. Evidence from the few
firms that have experimented with the "devolu-
tion of managerial functions ' ' is conflicting. Some
report an almost pathetic pleasure over consulta-
tion on very minor matters,®^ some a real interest
in general policy, some a refusal to take responsi-
bility. Perhaps a better judgment of the interest
of workers in "running things" might be formed
from a study of their organizing activities outside

•• Cf., p. 191.

36 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

the workshop, — the Trade Union Movement itself,
with the remarkable series of experiments and
failures and successes in devising forms of
organization which make (or should make)
the two great books of the Webbs books for the
political scientist; the Co-operative Movement,
with what D. F. Schloss called **its power to pro-
mote the organization upon democratic lines of
the working classes by the working classes"; the
Dissenting Chapels, in regard to which Mrs. Webb
wrote of *'the debt which English democracy
owes to the magnificent training given by Protes-
tant Dissent in the art of self-government;" the
national and local work of the Labor Party; and
so on. The question runs beyond the scope of the
present study. The extent and range of working
class organizations may be put on one side, the
poor attendance at trade union meetings ^* and the
low percentage of votes cast on important trade
union ballots on the other. Some organizing in-
terest is surely "there," in the shop steward's
phrase ; the important question is really whether
or not it will be turned inwards upon industry it-
self.

These demands that bear directly upon the ques-
tion of authority are of the highest importance
in a study of the control problem. Control is a

•* " To get an attendance of 70 to 100 out of a branch member-
ship of 300 to 1000 is a sign of stirring times, or of unemploy-
ment," says Mr. J. T. Murphy.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 37

political ^^ word. The demands previously studied
are not primarily political; they are concerned
with the control of industry not as an end but as
a possible means, and they might conceivably be
satisfied without changes in workshop politics.
But the "political" demands now under discus-
sion are concerned more nearly with control for
its own sake ; their chance of satisfaction depends
directly ^^ upon the type of industrial government.
These "political" demands may be phrased as
the demand not to he controlled disagreeably, the
demand not to he controlled at all, and the demand
to take a hand in controlling. The first runs
through all trade union activity. The second is
less widespread. The conscious general resent-
ment is vastly less than the sum of particular irri-
tations, but it is the powerful driving passion of
the control agitation. The third — the desire for
a share in the job of running things — is real but
less immediate.

The force of these freedom demands is hard
to measure. Apparently they run as an under-
current in many of labor's campaigns on other
issues. It is impossible to judge the extent to
which a vague and uneasy sense of oppression

*' " Political," that is, in the wide sense of concerned with au-
thority relationships ; not " political " in the narrow sense of
relating to the authority of the State of territorial unit.

" Except in so far as the organizing interest is drawn off into
non-industrial channels.

38 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

adds to the bitterness and determination with
which apparently trivial disputes are fought. It
is by now a commonplace " to say that the occa-
sion or formulated issue of a strike, as of a war,
is only a part of its cause or of the emotions that
are called out; surely a part of the emotion that
gathers around any industrial struggle is that of
servant against master. It is in this sense that Mr.
Straker calls **the straining of the will of man to
be free" the root cause of labor unrest. And it
is the linking of this feehng with the economic
motive that makes ** wage- slavery" a powerful
phase for propagandists to conjure with.

These political factors are rightly thought of
as the essential part of the demand for control.
Possibly they are not the strongest part of the
demand, but they are the part least likely to be
diverted from the issue of the government of in-
dustry. They are the core of the demand; the
other motives may in various circumstances be
added unto it.

The worker's interests in the work itself — in
what he actually/ does, in the technical processes
of industry — have also important bearings on the
control problem. Cannan's analysis of the resent-
ment against control includes both "political" and

•^ Thanks in part to the work of the late Carleton Parker.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 39

technical factors. The ''feeling when you are told
to do what you know, or think you know, to be the
wrong thing," is surely a workmanlike distaste
for inefficiency. The technical interests are often
grouped under the one term worktnanship '®; it is
safer to discuss them simply as interests in the
job.

The interest usually mentioned first under this
head is craftsmanship, the feeling of the indi-
vidual craftsman toward his own particular bit of
skilled technique. And the first thing that is
usually said about it is that it is dead or at
least dying out.^® Certainly the long run effects
of the transition from handicraft to modern ma-
chine industry bear heavily in that direction. ' * In
the technique of handicraft the central fact is
always the individual workman." On the other
hand, *'the share of the operative workman in the
machine industry is (typically) that of an atten-
dant, an assistant, whose duty it is to keep pace
with the machine process and to help out with
workmanlike manipulation at points where the
machine process is incomplete."*" Crafts and
craftsmanship are clearly going down together

" Cf. especially Thornstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workman-
ship.

'•"The worst indictment of capitalism," one ex-joiner told me
with unexpected bitterness.

*' The Instinct of Workmanship, pp. 234, 806. The last two
chapters of the book are a discussion of the institutional bearings
of this technological change.

40 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

before the advance of fool-proof machinery and
standardized industry.

But it is much too early to count off craftsman-
ship as a genuine force in industry. Nor is it
strictly true to say that it survives only in the
tiny remaining handicrafts or only in the trades
mentioned in Section XIX under the topic of
"old craft control." Even in the great industry
there are occasional indications of craftsmanship
— though no propagandist movement is finding it
worth while to bring together evidence on the
point. The best signs of it are in fact those that
come out incidentally in the course of discussions
on other subjects — such as the use by a certain
skilled joiner of his own dexterous hands as the
basis for his social theories,*^ the use by an en-
gineering trades official of "cutting a micrometer
scale ' ' as the type of something that required real
skill, or the following passage on rate-fixing from
the Ministry of Labor's report on Works Com-
mittees : —

**A discussion that starts about the price of a job
often finishes by two men staking their reputations as
craftsmen and their experience as workmen that they
are absolutely right. ' '

I have even heard an engineering shop steward
confess to a certain pride in the skill of the craft
whose special privileges he was attacking.

*'" Human hands too valuable" to be used for "donkey work."

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 41

Craftsmanship is still a force, though a dimin-
ishing one. In relation to the control demand it
cuts two ways. It is a conservative factor in the
resistance of the old crafts against ''encroach-
ments" upon their ancient forms of control.*'' It
moreover is an element in stiffening the demand
not to be controlled. The true craftsmen will
stand very little supervision in regard to his own
technique. The glass bottle maker will not work
under a manager who is not trained as a glass
bottle hand. ' 'I know how to do my job and won't
be told how" — this was quoted as almost the cen-
tral element in the demand not to be controlled.
Pride in craft skill may often make a part of that
independence which resists irksome control.

But craftsmanship seems to cut just the other
way in relation to the positive side of the control
demand. The old craft unions are completely in-
different to the newer ''political" demands. The
craftsman may be quick to resent interference with
his own work, but he is not likely to bother about
organizing activities very far outside that work.
"The artist, the craftsman, the scholar and the
scientist have one overpowering desire; to be let
alone," writes Mr. Arthur Gleason. "They
haven't the slightest wish to run anything or any-
body, to manage, to 'know the commercial side,' to
market the product or to control the raw

" See below. Section XIX.

42 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

material." It is true that some of the control
propaganda — notably that of one school of Guild
Socialists — runs in terms of a return to crafts-
manship; but the immediate program of workers'
control is a program of opportunities for political
activity within large-scale industry. If Professor
Wallas is at all right in making ''concentration
on what he can see and touch" the essential
characteristic of the craftsman,*' it is no use for
National Guildsmen to talk arts and crafts and at
the same time to point to the Miners' Federation
of Great Britain and the National Union of Rail-
waymen as promising steps "Towards National
Guilds." Craftsmanship has no direct connection
with representative government. By its concen-
tration on the immediate and highly individual
skill it runs counter to the general organizing
interest which makes up the positive side of the
demand to exercise control, biit by the very pride
in that individual skill it stiffens the refusal to be
controlled.

So much for the relation of craftsmanship to
control. But the chances of interest in the work
for the work's sake do not end with individual
manual craftsmanship. The enthusiastic manag-
ing director of a great engineering firm may have
as keen an interest in the process of production as
any Swiss wood carver. Large-scale ' ' social pro-

** Graham Wallas, The Great Society, p. 4.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 43

duction" has to a great extent taken the place
of individual production. With it have come a
set of interests in the technique of group-organi-
zation as well as in the technique of individual
work. Collective workmanship might serve as a
general term for them, but the interests covered
would run from an interest in the routing of work
in a particular shop to an interest in the governing
and lay-out of great industrial enterprises. Some
of these feelings — that of the individual in-
ventor,** for example, or the pride in a great in-
dustry,*^ or the queer generalized pride in being
"practical men"*" and ''industrialists" — ^bear
only indirectly on the demand for control. At
least one interest, the pride in a particular firm's
workmanship — ^Wedgwood's in the Potteries is
one of a few cases — ^may run counter to the con-
trol demands. But certain of these interests in
collective work appear directly as part of the
control demand.

The most conspicuous of these is the demand
for the right to make suggestions about the con-
duct of the work. Of the reality of this interest
there is abundant evidence.*^ A foreman in one of

"But cf., pp. 217-219.

" But note the use of the pride in "the industry as a national
service" in the Buildin? Trades Parliament.

*• It would be amusing to count the number of times this
phrase is used, both by employers and workers, in a year's crop
of arbitration proceedings and blue books on labor problems.

*'See Section XVI.

44 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

the National Factories *^ was telling me how the
management had encouraged suggestions both
from the foremen's and the workers' committees.
*'It isn't only the big wages," he declared em-
phatically. **The men like to have their ideas
taken up. ' ' In discussing the demand for control
with a group of Derbyshire miners, I found — to
my surprise — that this was the issue on which they
showed the greatest interest. One man got up
and declared: —

"There isn't a man in this room who hasn't time and
again made suggestions and been told he was paid not
to think but to work."

The evening turned into a sort of testimony
meeting in which the men related different specific
suggestions that they had made, and the next
noon the colliery blacksmith stopped me on the
road to explain to me how he thought his company
might use compressed air more efficiently, and sa
on. This interest in making suggestions — and the
strong feeling that the chance to make them is
blocked under the present type of industrial gov-
ernment— are real factors in the demand for con-
trol.

The interest in making suggestions, moreover,
can hardly be separated from the interest in see-
ing those suggestions put into force. It is in fact

*' Munition plants run directly by the Government.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 45

only a special form of a general interest in the
running of modem industry. Various traces of
an interest in the technical efficiency of industry
may be found in labor feeling. There is at least a
certain negative interest, a disgust with various
sorts of inefficiency. Evidence is hard to collect
since, as a building trades union official remarked,
most of the discussions of workmen on a job about
the inefficiency of their employers can find no
outlet in the form of suggestions.*^ One of the
Derbyshire miners just quoted talked of being
''told to do the silliest things imaginable." A
Clyde shop steward told me that a disgust with
the inefficiencies of management was always there
for the agitator to ''play on" — evidence the
more interesting because the object of the agita-
tion was certainly not to stir up technical interest.
How widespread this sense of irritation with in-
efficiencies in organization may be, it is impossible
to say. Its clearest expression is in the complaints
of the Miners, enforced by trade union power,
against inefficiencies in the arrangements for
haulage, etc."" Nor does this interest always re-
main merely negative. There are even cases of
the urging of positive changes in organization.
This is shown in the elaborate schemes of the

'•See Section XVI for the results in a few cases where an
otitlet has been provided.
"See Section XV.

46 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Post Office Workers for extending the financial
side of the postal service, of which one of their
leaders speaks as follows: —

* ' The workers want to take part in the administration
of the Department. For years past they have proffered
suggestions whereby the public could be better served
and the services more efficiently organized and man-
aged, but they have been turned down."

It is shown in the detailed suggestions on the
technique of the industry presented to the Coal
Commission by the Miners' Federation. What
Justice Sankey called the Miners' "higher am-
bition of taking their due share and interest in
the direction of the industry," is, as he realized,
of great significance. It marks the appearance
of the managing and planning interest as a definite
factor in the control demand.

Workmanship in this most general sense is an
idea that has run through part of the propaganda
of workers' control ever since the agitation of
1911. One of Mr. Mann's followers declared that
year : —

"I for one believe we have yet to see good work, and
that will be when work is made pleasant and attractive,
well organized by capable men, who will have been
elected by their mates. ... I understand Syndicalism
is to use some of its efforts at making the worker take
a vital interest in the industry he is connected with,

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 47

thereby preparing him for the democratic control of
the industrial community of the future."

The most comprehensive statement of the work-
manship part of the demand — and one that adds
to it the demand for knowledge about large-scale
industry — is given in Mr. Straker's testimony
before the Coal Commission on March 13, 1919 : —

"Any administration of the mines, under nationaliza-
tion, must not leave the worker in the position of a mere
wage-earner, whose whole energies are directed by the
will of another. He must have a share in the manage-
ment of the industry in which he is engaged, and un-
derstand all about the purpose and destination of the
product he is producing; he must know both the pro-
ductive and the commercial side of the industry. He
must feel that the industry is being run by him in
order to produce coal for the use of the community,
instead of profit for a few people. He would thus feel
the responsibility which would rest upon him as a citi-
zen, and direct his energies for the common good.

This ideal cannot be reached all at once, owing to
the way in which private ownership has deliberately
kept the worker in ignorance regarding the industry;
but as that knowledge which has been denied him grows,
as it will do under nationalization, he will take his right-
ful place as a man. Only then will labor unrest, which
is the present hope of the world, disappear."

This explicit plea for the chance of workmanship
is the demand of a few. When Mr. Ben Turner,

48 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

the veteran leader of the Textile Workers, put the
question at the Trades Union Congress; — ''Why
shouldn't they sing at their work?" the cheers
were more out of pleasure in his personality than
from any very definite notion of work that might
be worth singing about. The Right of Workman-
ship is not carried as a motto on the street banners
of the labor movement.

These various interests in the job tie back to
all the other factors of the control demand. A
striking case of the substitution of the workman-
ship for the wage motive has already been men-
tioned. The last statement quoted from Mr.
Straker's evidence is one of many that show the
blending of the public service and workmanship
interests. The relations between the freedom and
workmanship demands are even more central to
the control problem. Craftsmanship has already
been spoken of as strengthening the objection to
being controlled, and surely all forms of work-
manship fortify what Mr. Cole calls * ' the natural
impulse we all feel to push aside anyone whom we
see doing badly what we can do better." The
feeling of inferiority which deepens the bitterness
of the agitation for control is in part a feeling of
functional inferiority. It is impossible to separate
the ''organizing interest" spoken of as the posi-
tive side of the "political" demand from the
interests in organizing industry just discussed.

THE DEMAND FOR CONTROL 49

In fact it is just where the two are one that the
control demand is the clearest. The general
interest in organization becomes directly impor-
tant for control only when it is turned to the organ-
izing of industry ; the general interests in industry
become directly important for control only as they
become organizing interests. In a list of the
nucleus elements of the demand for control —
those elements, that is, that can hardly be diverted
from the issue of the control of industry — it is
necessary to put with the ''political" factors of
the determination of workers not to he run and
their desire to rum things the ** workmanship"
addition that it is industry that workers want to
run. This is indeed implied in the quotation which
began this introduction. Mr. Straker, it is true,
states the demand in terms of ''the straining of
the will of men to be free ; ' ' but he has more than
once explained that he means by that not merely
a negative freedom but a positive freedom, a free-
dom to do something. The content of his idea of
freedom is in fact workmanship. It would, I
think, be fair to his position to rephrase it as

follows : — ■

I
Wages and conditions are not enough. They have
been improved and the unrest is still strong. Mere
negative freedom from harsh discipline is not enough.
That tjifi Northumberland Miners have long been able
to secure and the unrest is still strong. The root of the

50 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

matter is a demand for a pasitive freedom of responsi-
bility a/nd self-expression.

But such a clear-cut claim for control is the claim
of a tiny minority. Most of the driving force of
the movement comes from other motives, and no
single statement can pretend to express all the
confused strivings that make up the total demand.
The whole of this introduction makes only a be-
ginning at describing its complexity. The actual
demand for control is a tangle of half -expressed
and shifting and richly varied desires. That is, it
is a human phenomenon.

It is a dogma in the somewhat Early Christian
faith of the Clyde shop stewards that "the fer-
ment creates its own organization. " It is at least
''ferment" that makes ''organization" interest-
ing. And it is the ferment of the demand for
control that makes worth while a patient study
of the present extent of control.

A STUDY IN BRITISH WORKSHOP
POLITICS

CONTROL

There is a theory current that the employer does
and should exercise something that is known as
''complete executive control" over industry.
There are other theories current that the organ-
ized workers should — sooner or later, and more
or less completely — take over ''the control of
industry." Workshop politics are forcing them-
selves into first place in social politics, and the
workshop conflict represented by these ideas is
perhaps the most significant fact in the social
politics of the day. This study is an attempt to
make a record of the present stage of the conflict
in Great Britain in terms of the questions : — What
is the present extent, and what are the boundaries,
of workers' control? How much control of in-
dustry do the British workers now exercise?

But "control" over what? The term is used
by the contestants in the struggle in an undefined
but somewhat specialized sense. When one of the
coal-owners on the Coal Commission asked one

51

B!^ THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

of the Miners' Executive what they meant when
they said they wanted control, and the answer
was: — '*We mean just what you mean when you
say we must not have control," they were using
a term an outsider might well try to define for
himself.

''Complete executive control" might mean,
among other things, that the employer "by his
absolute knowledge and mere motion" provides
capital, decides what to produce and how to pro-
duce it, provides any sort of place to work, hires
whom he likes, pays his hands any wages by any
system, works them any number of hours he likes,
drives them by any method and with any degree
of supervision, promotes, fines, or dismisses them
for any cause, trains any hand for any job, dic-
tates every process in the minutest detail — and
does all this and more "subject to change without
notice." But the most cursory acquaintance with
industry or a glance at a few typical collective
agreements shows that the employer ^ has no such

* The use of the phrase " the employer " is not meant to imply
that all employers are alike either in personality or in their
position in industry. But the differences between employers,
great as they are, are comparatively unimportant in the present
connection since they are not usually expressed in differences of
the extent of control they leave to their employees. The popular
distinction between " good " and " bad " employer is of no use
for the present purpose, — except in so far as the " bad " employer
may arouse his employees to devise means of controlling him, or
as the "good" employer may also happen to believe, in Mr.
Seebohm Rowntree's phrase, in "giving as much control as he
can instead of as little as he must."

CONTROL 53

control as this. The real question is how much
less does he mean by ''complete executive control."
There is after all such a thing as a trade union
and, as Professor Commons says, ''If it cannot
prevent the employer from doing as he pleases at
some point or other, it is something besides a
trade union." But the question is, which points?
What matters have been recognized as subjects
for consultation, at least, rather than employer's
fiat?

First and most obviously, wages and hours.
The "wage bargain" has always been in the eyes
of the law a bargain between equals. The primary
function of the trade union has been to restore
to this contract some degree of real equality.
These are of course the questions on which the
workers now exercise their most important share
of control.

In the second place, some of the more obvious
physical "conditions of employment" — ^ventila-
tion, sanitary arrangements, and works conven-
iences generally — have also long been subject
both to collective bargaining and Factory Act
legislation.

Neither of these things, though, is control in
the sense that either a fighting employer or a
propagandist of "workers' control" would use
the term. An employer's control over industry
is not destroyed by the fact that he has to buy

64 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

labor with much the same equality in bargaining
that he buys other factors in production. And
matters of toilets and air space and welfare work
are after all not vital to absolute power over the
actual organization of production.

The question of ''control" arises beyond the
immediate contract of so many hours or so many
pieces of work for so much pay, and beyond the
obvious physical "conditions of employment," in
the debatable ground where regulating the "con-
ditions of employment" appears from another
point of view to be actual sharing in the organiza-
tion of industry. The object of the present study
is to find out how much control the workers have
over matters that are

(1) Less immediate to the "wage bargain" it-

self than Rates of Wages and Hours of
Labor.

(2) More immediate to the "actual business

of production" than Ventilation, etc.
What degree of control do the trade unions
exercise over the relations of man to man in indus-
try— the employment and discipline relationships ;
and over the relations of man to the work itself — •
to the plans, processes, and technique of industry!
How much say have the workers over what the
boot manufacturers once called "the internal
economy of the workshop and the manipulation of
the workman by the employer?"

CONTROL 65

The first and obvious answer is — directly and
explicitly, very little. A longer and more critical
answer requires study and analysis of collective
agreements and arbitration awards, of trade union
regulations, of jealously guarded shop practices
and customs of the trades, of the issues of strikes,
and of the demands of the revolutionary minority.

In theory trade union rules rarely extend beyond
the ** conditions of employment" in the sense of
the famous definition of the Webbs of a trade
union as "a continuous association of wage-earn-
ers for the purpose of maintaining or improving
the conditions of their employment. ' ' ^ But it is
at least worth a study of such "conditions" as the
non-unionist, apprenticeship and demarcation
questions; the various expedients for meeting
unemployment; discipline, dismissals and the
handling of grievances ; promotion and the choice
and authority of foremen; methods and payment
and the measurement of results; restrictions on
technique; consultation over change in technique
and over trade policy, etc., to determine to what
extent they involve, in fact if not in form, trade
union

(1) interference with

(2) consultation over

(3) direction of

the actual organization of industry.
• History of Trade Unioimm, p. 1. See Note on Sources.

n

THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

** Workers' control" is, I suppose, often trans-
lated as ''interfering with the employer's busi-
ness." A definite notion of the meaning attached
to the latter phrase would be of use in finding the
fighting frontier of control. Where does the
issue come into the open? At what point does
the employer say — ^beyond this there shall be no
discussion, the rest is my business alone? The

line is a hard one to draw; the issues are rarely

•

thought out in the abstract and rarely presented
dramatically. The real frontier, like most lines in
industry, is more a matter of accepted custom
than of precisely stated principle. In a few in-
stances, however, there have been definite at-
tempts to stake out the boundary, evidently as
results of disputes in which the principle became
explicit.

There are for example a number of collective
agreements ^ that attempt to define the ''Authority
of Employers ' ' in such terms as these : —

"Each employer shall conduct his business in any
way he may think advantageous in all details of man-

* Report on Collective Agreements. See Note on Sources.

56

THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL 57

agement, not infringing on the individual liberty of the
workman or these rules." (Liverpool Carpenters and
Joiners.)

"Each employer shall have the power to conduct his
business in any way he may think advantageous in the
matter of letting work, taking apprentices, using ma-
chinery and implements, and in all details of manage-
ment not infringing these rules." (Birmingham Brick-
layers.)

**That Dressers shall not interfere in any way what-
ever with the management of workshops." (Scottish
Steel Dressers.)

"The right of the Association to organize its equip-
ment and to regulate its labor with a view to the lowest
cost of production." (Bradford Dyers Association.)

The most famous of these declarations of the
employers' authority was the Engineering Trades
Agreement signed in 1898 after a great and un-
successful strike. This declared under the head
of *' General Principle of Freedom to Employers
in the Management of their Works, ' ' that : —

"The Federated Employers, while disavowing any
intention of interfering with the proper functions of
Trade Unions, wiU admit no interference with the man-
agement of their business. . . . Employers are re-
sponsible for the work turned out by their machine
tools, and shall have full discretion to appoint the men
they consider suitable to work them, and determine the
conditions under which such machine tools shall be
worked."

68 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

In addition to these attempts to define positively
the borderline of control there are a number of
agreements which define it negatively by setting
aside questions which are not matters for discus-
sion. Certain questions, they say, are questions
.for bargaining or arbitration; certain questions
are vital and reserved to the employer. It is worth
while to mention a few of these non- justiciable
questions of industry. The Pottery arbitration
agreement which preceded the present Joint
Industrial Council ruled out the two questions of
**Good from Oven" (deduction from wages for
broken pots) and "Limitation of Apprentices."
A Liverpool Dockers agreement provides "that
the Union shall not interfere with the methods of
working cargo on ships or quay." Leicester Boot
and Shoe arbitration arrangements provide that
"no Board shall interfere with the right of an
employer to make reasonable regulations for time-
keeping and the preservation of order in his fac-
tory or workshop." The last rule of a pioneer
"Works Committee in the woollen industry reads :

"It is understood and agreed that it is the business
of the management, and is not the business of the Con-
ference to deal with: —

(a) The allocation of work to particular sets of

drawing.

(b) The allocation of winders to particular ma-

chines. ' '

THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL 59

More typical, however, are provisions such as the
following : —

"Questions of discipline and management not to be
interfered with." (London Motor Bus Employees.)

Under questions to be discussed: — "Differences relat-
ing to general conditions of labor (not being questions
of discipline and management)." (London County
Council Tramways.)

Arbitration on "any question other than one which
he [the arbitrator] shall decide to relate to manage-
ment and discipline." (Bobbin Turners, etc., at Garton
and Coverholme.)

The phrase *' discipline and management" has
been made most prominent by its appearance in
the remarkable succession of railway crises. Dur-
ing the ** all-grades movement" of 1907, which
turned on the issue of union recognition, Mr.
-Robert Bell, the Secretary of the Railway Serv-
ants, was ''on all occasions most emphatic in
denying that it was the desire of the men's execu-
tive committee to interfere with the discipline of
the railway staffs," while Lord Claud Hamilton
(who wanted his men **to be free and independent
as subjects of a Constitutional Monarch") and
other railway directors were firm in their ** abso-
lute refusal to allow the society to interfere in our
domestic relations with our staff." The Concilia-

60 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

tion Boards, set up in that year as Mr. Lloyd
George's solution of the difficulty, were expressly
limited to the consideration of "rates of wages
and hours of labor." By the time of the railway
strike of 1911, the attitude of the men was changed.
When their leaders testified before the Royal
Commission of that year, they were no longer
willing to repeat the absolute denial of an interest
in discipline. Mr. J. H. Thomas in fact argued
that, ''the common sense of two parties meeting
in a representative capacity is more likely to arrive
at a right decision than through one side's taking
up the attitude that it is purely a question for
them to determine. . . . The men are distinctly of
opinion that all questions ought to be discussed
and settled by the Board. ' ' The Commission, how-
ever, reported that "with their great responsibili-
ties the companies cannot and should not be ex-
pected to permit any intervention between them
and their men on the subjects of discipline and
management ; ' ' and by the 1911 scheme, although
the companies are to receive deputations on "any
questions affecting the contractual relations be-
tween the company and its employees," the
Boards themselves are limited to consideration of
"rates of wages, hours of labor, or conditions of
service, other than matters of management and
discipline." Since that time the last clause has
been the storm center of the industry^ and the dis-

THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL 61

satisfaction with it is now expressed in a demand
for nationalization with joint control by the
workers and the State.

''Discipline and management," then, has often
summed up the issue of control. The phrase would
perhaps most often be used by an employer to
describe the issues over which he would refuse to
share control. And, from the other side, the
president of the National Union of Railwaymen
declares that, ''it is in the fierce questions of dis-
cipline and management," that his union has
found its soul.

But when one has said that discipline and man-
agement are the crux of the control problem, one
is not very far along. The phrase almost disap-
pears under analysis. The specific issues that
have come under what the Railway Review calls
"the symbols D and M" include such things as
dismissals, promotions, classification of employees,
a doubtful safety regulation, etc. The Steel Dres-
sers agreement quoted above goes on to include
under the reservations to management the alloca-
tion of work between classes of workmen. The
Engineering agreement put in the same category
the selection, training, and employment of opera-
tives and the right to pay according to ability.
And in 1907 the Railway Gazette even argued
that if wages and hours were "fixed by two dif-
ferent bodies" {i.e. by negotiation with a union)

^ th;e FRt)¥rriEii op control

sm impossible ' ''dtia^lity of ^anagetnelat ^wmld
arise 1" But ^11 tkese q^aestiofis have of course
been subjects for <collesc!tive bargaining in other
trades.

Oaa the other hand, there are many cases of what
an outsider would surely call consultation over
''management" into which the disturbing word or
idea never enters. The employment manager for
an employers* association told me, for example,
that various works committees in his trade found
themselves discussing such matters as the reason
why on a given morning there was no work ready
for the piece workers. If anyone had suggested
that that was a question of ** management," of the
actual arranging of production, the employers
would doubtless have closed the discussion. But
to everybody concerned it seemed merely the ques-
tion of how to make sure that the piece workers
should find work at starting time.

Discipline and management, then, are conve-
nient terms for the frontier of control. But that
frontier must be looked for as a shifting line in a
great mass of regulations in regard to which the
question of control may never have arisen. The
material in this section, then, is interesting only
as indicating a few of the cases in which the issue
of control has been fought consciously, in which
the frontier of management has seemed to its
defenders a hard chalk line.

in

EMPLOYMENT

The employer is sometimes spoken of as the
man who finds jobs for workers. But to what ex-
tent do the trade unions determine which jobs are
found for which workers 1 To what extent do the
trade unions possess what D. F. Schloss called the
''power of rejecting as fellow workers persons
who appear to them to be undesirable compan-
ions ? "

An obvious limitation on the employer's control
under this head is the tendency of any strong
union to reject non-unionists as fellow-workers.
The employer's right and practice of keeping
union members out and employing only non-union-
ists has practically gone by the board in Great
Britain, if not in America. The issue now, where
there is an issue, is whether the employer shall be
permitted to employ any but unionists. The na-
tural intensity of feeling on this point is best ex-
pressed by a comparison made by the shrewd
secretary of an employers ' association of the non-
unionist to the conscientious objector, or by the
following extract from a form letter drafted by a

64 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Railwaymen's district council to be sent to the
wives of non-unionists: —

"Dear Madam,

Do you know your husband is in receipt of a War
Bonus, which the members of the N. U. R. have worked
and paid for, and he has done nothing except to act
like the young birds in a nest and take what others
have struggled hard to get? "

It is difficult to measure the exact extent to which
union membership has become a necessary condi-
tion of employment. Two or three great indus-
tries, certain skilled trades within other indus-
tries, and a few old crafts are practically * 'black-
leg-proof. ' ' ^ Coal-mining is the nearest approach
to a completely-unionized great industry. The
Miners' Federation of Great Britain claims just
under 99% of the underground workers, exclud-
ing officials, and 95% of the surface workers; and
of the remainder many are organized in other
unions.^ In certain collieries the management
itself collects the union dues by deducting from
the men's pay and receives a percentage for its
pains; and there are even instances of successful
strikes against the employment of men in arrears
to the union. In cotton there is practically no
opening for the non-unionist on the spinning side

* " Blackleg " is the British trade unionist's equivalent for the
American trade unionist's expression " scab."

* Coal Commission Evidence, Question 23635 et teq. .

EMPLOYMENT 65

of the industry, at least in Lancashire, and very-
little in weaving. The Boilermakers have long
claimed 95% organization and the other skilled
shipbuilding unions are in practically the same
position. The remarkable growth of the National
Union of Kailwaymen and the Eailway Clerks'
Association has made the railways stand very
high in percentage of unionists. In the wool in-
dustry the Dyers claim a 100% organization, and
their agreement with the Bradford Dyers' Asso-
ciation provides that **any employee ceasing to be
a member of any of the Unions shall be required
by the Association to resume membership of one
or other of the Unions. ' ' The Huddersfield Dyers
and the Bradford Woolcombers work under sim-
ilar arrangements. Such old crafts as the Glass
Bottle Makers, Flint Glass Makers and Hand
Papermakers are almost completely unionized, as
well as such small skilled sections of larger indus-
tries as the Stuff Pressers (wool). Lithographic
Printers, Calico Printers and Tape Sizers (cot-
ton). Other industries — ^probably most industries
— vary widely in this regard from district to dis-
trict or from shop to shop. In the Manchester dis-
trict, for example, the painters have a closed-shop
agreement (though only with the organized em-
ployers) and the other building trades are push-
ing for it; in many parts of the country these
trades are very imperfectly organized. In engi-

66 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

neering, with a higli total percentage of union
membership, the enforcement of the closed shop
condition varies entirely with the strength in the
various works of a given town. In printing,
although the union compositors refuse to work
except in **fair houses" {i.e. all-union), rival **rat
houses" continue to flourish; and the London So-
ciety of Compositors wages a continual campaign
to make sure that all public contracts go to the
former class of firms. In many industries, of
course, and particularly in the distributive trades,
there are hardly the beginnings of compulsory
unionism.

From the point of view of our question about
control, this enforcing of union membership is
interesting chiefly as a basis for extensions of
control to issues more closely bound up with the
actual processes of production. The same is true
of the custom of using the trade unions as employ-
ment exchanges. This is usually merely a matter
of obvious convenience to both parties, without
any thought of control. The man out of work goes
to his union oflBce to sign the ' * call book" and draw
his out-of-work pay ; the employer naturally sends
there to find him. The union secretary will prob-
ably boast that his office is a better employment
agency for his own trade than the public one — or
possibly fear or despise the public exchanges as
blackleg agencies — ^but that is about all it comes to.

EMPLOYMENT 67

More interesting, however, are cases wliere the
union, in the interest of fairness between its mem-
bers or for other reasons, makes some regulation
as to which men shall be hired first. The "Eules
Governing Calls" of the London Society of Com-
positors provide : —

"All calls for workmen received at the Society House
shall be given to the members whose names appear first
on the list, ..."

"Employers, overseers, or their agents may choose
workmen from the list irrespective of the position in
which their names appear on the book ; but the members
so chosen may, if they think fit, refuse such employment,
unless of those present they are first- in order on the
book."

The workman may look for work on his own account,
but "any member intercepting, in the street or else-
where, a messenger with a call that is intended for the
Secretary, shall be dealt with by the Committee as they
may determine."

Many unions advise, and in some cases require,
their members to consult the union secretary be-
fore applying for a job in order to make sure that
conditions are ' * fair. ' ' An adaptation of this prin-
ciple is the claim of the Sailors' and Firemen's
Union, denied in 1911 but granted for the duration
of the war with the setting up in 1914 of the Na-
tional Maritime Board, that representatives of the
union ''be present when men sign on."

68 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

The rules of this Maritime Board also estab-
lished the principle of " a single source of supply
jointly controlled by employers and employed."
An important further extension of control is the
requirement that the employer must hire exclu-
sively through the union or at least give the union
first chance to provide a man. The agreement in
the China Furniture trade — where the employers
and employed combine to keep up prices — ^pro-
vides : —

"The Operatives' Association shall undertake to pro-
vide at all times for a due supply of efficient workpeople,
so that the business of Members of the [IManufacturers'J
Association may in no way be hindered. Should the sup-
ply of workmen fall below the number required, the
Wages Board shall at once take into consideration the
best way of remedying the evil."

The Bradford Dyers' Association agreement of
July 1, 1914, reads : —

"The Association* shall on the engagement of em-
ployees first make application to the unions to supply
the employees required. The unions shall supply em-
ployees with the least possible delay, and if the unions
do not supply employees satisfactory to the Association
within 24 hours of receipt of a requisition in writing
from the Association, the latter shall be free to engage
persons who are not members of the unions, but such

* A trust not an association of independent firms.

EMPLOYMENT 69

persons shall be required by the Association forthwith to
become members of one or other of the unions."

This last system, together with the method of
collective piece work provided for by the same
agreement, has an interesting by-product in trade
union responsibility for technique. The members
of the National Society of Dyers are supposed to
be able to perform all the processes of the trade ;
if, however, their secretary has to send to an em-
ployer a man who has had no experience in the
particular process for which he is wanted, he
sends at the same time a note to the shop steward *
so that the others will ''pull him through."

The Stuff Pressers, a small and highly skilled
craft within the wool industry, are by far the most
striking example of trade union regulation of em-
ployment. With them the '' staffing of shops" is
entirely the function of the union. The method
is described by a member in the Organiser of
April, 1918:—

' ' The success of the union is further demonstrated by
its methods of dealing with trade depression and slack-
ness of shops. The experience gained in this direction
during the past ten years has been invaluable. . . . To-
day the Pressors' Society has a travelling man power, a

* " Shop steward " as used here means merely a representative
of organized workers within a particular shop or works. The
term is most widely used in the engineering industry; "constable"
and " father of the chapel " are parallel terms in printing. The
"shop stewards' movement" has already been discussed.

70 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

small but efficient body of skilled men who are ready-
to respond to any call that the demand might make.
This mobile reserve has contributed largely to the solu-
tion of the unemployment problem [in an industry of
marked fluctuations in trade] . . . The method of choos-
ing men is usually by the request for volunteers from the
shops. If the voluntary principle is ineffective, the
shop resorts to the ancient method of 'picking out of
the bag'. . . . The success of the scheme can be gauged
from the fact that the Society has not had an unemployed
member for nearly five years."

It is worth noting, in reference to the relation
of 100% unionism to other forms of control, that
the writer goes on to say that, ' * the principle of
the mobility of labor . . . owes its success to
the fact that the Society is practically blackleg
proof." This is, I am sure, the instance of most
complete actual control over the finding of jobs.
In this case it apparently grew up without any
conscious theory, certainly without any public
propaganda. The theorists of control, however,
have not completely neglected the possibilities of
the control of labor supply as a basis for the
control of industry. The Engineering and Ship-
building Draughtsmen, whose journal talks much
of ''status" and ''control," voted in March, 1919,
to secure for their Association, as soon as possible,
a monopoly over employment quite consciously
as a "new and formidable engine of control."
And Messrs. Gallecher and Paton, of the Clyde en-

i

EMPLOYMENT 71

gineering shop stewards, in their Memorandum on
Workshop Control, suggest for their District
Committee both the '* skilful manipulation" of
labor supply as a weapon for immediate fighting
purposes and the ultimate function under full
workers ' control of ' ' the effective and economical
distribution of labor.'"

IV
UNEMPLOYMENT

The last paragraph of the preceding section
shows how the problem of employment becomes
the problem of unemployment. Here we might
well expect to find real trade union attempts at
the organization of industry, for the question is of
much more pressing importance to the union than
to the employer. The difference in immediate
economic interest is this: — ^the employer is inter-
ested in finding men for jobs; the union is inter-
ested in finding jobs for men — interests ''iden-
tical ' ' only in busy seasons. In fact the employer's
bargaining power increases directly with the size
of the "reserve army" of unemployed. In slack
seasons the unions are faced with this danger to
their standard as well as the necessity of support-
ing their own members * ' on the funds. ' ' This is
only another way of saying that the fear of unem-
ployment is a ruling motive both for the individual
workman and for his trade organizations. ''Want
or uncertainty of employment for the industrial
classes," is still what William Thompson called it
in 1830 — a "master-evil of society as now con-
stituted. ' *

72

UNEMPLOYMENT 78

The principle expressed in most trade union
attempts to meet tlie problem is a simjDle one —
that no one should have more work than he needs
until all have as much as they need. ' ' They want
to ration employment so that all will have their
proper share." {Strike Bulletin, Clyde, Febru-
ary 8, 1919.)

The simplest arrangements, usually found in
the less important trades, are those for the shar-
ing of work. The Webbs give us the most primi-
tive instance the "Turnway Societies" of Thames
watermen for regulating the ''turns" of work.
The London Corn Porters provide for equaliza-
tion of work by ''rotation of gangs." A reflec-
tion of quarrels under this head is the following
agreement reached by the tailors after the strike
of 1892:— In reference to the trade union rule
that provides that "during slack seasons a fair
equitable division of trade should be compulsory
in all shops, ' ' the employers, after stipulating that
this did not necessarily mean ' ' distribution of the
work in turns," stated that "we fully recognize
that the work ought to be fairly shared during the
slack season in harmony with the above, and we
urge upon our members throughout the country
to carry these principles into effect." And in 1903
the Scottish Master Tailors stated, "that in quiet
seasons they used their own discretion as at all
other times in giving the work to such work people

74 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

as they consider best capable of turning it out;
but the principle of job about shall be recog-
nized." Perhaps the most drastic regulation is
that enforced by the highly monopolistic York-
shire Glass Bottle Makers : —

"In the event of any furnace being out for repair,
slack trade or stopped from any other cause, the work-
men shall be allowed, so far as practicable, to share
work — provided, nevertheless, that after a furnace has
been out for four months the master can discharge the
surplus workmen. ' '

Many restrictions against overtime are based
partly on this principle. The general question of
overtime, in its important bearings on the standard
of leisure and the payment of extra wages, is
beyond the present inquiry ; but so far as it bears
on the equalization of work, it is of interest here.
The weakly-organized Garment Workers, who are
subject to busy seasons of constant overtime and
slack seasons of wholesale dismissals, are press-
ing for the complete abolition of overtime as a
means of forcing the employers to take steps to
prevent or minimize seasonal fluctuations. A 1919
agreement in the Making-up Clothing trade in
London provides for avoidance of overtime. The
same principle is evident in a Boilermakers'
agreement covering the South Wales ports : —

UNEMPLOYMENT 75

"No member . . . shall work more than one whole
night or two half turns as overtime, in addition to the
usual working days ... in any one week, whilst coitu
petent men are idle in the port, except on finishing jobs
which can be completed in not exceeding three hours'
labor. If more overtime be required on particular jobs,
such overtime must he given to the unemployed members
in the town" (italics mine).

A rule proposed by the Manchester building
trades unions puts the demand briefly : —

"No overtime to be worked in any branch of the
Building Industry whilst any men in that branch of the
industry and district are unemployed."

Organized short time is the most familiar pallia-
tive for unemployment. There is, says Professor
Bowley {An Elementary Manual of Statistics, p.
151), ''a group of industries in which certainly
more than two million persons are employed, in
which it is the custom to regulate the working
week in relation to the demand for the product,
employing nearly the same number of persons in
good trade and in bad, but working short time
when the market becomes overstocked . . .
Coal-mining is the most conspicuous industry of
this group. The textile trades (cotton, wool, and
others) organize employment with a similar re-
sult; short time is worked, or the work is spread
out among the operatives, when the demand is

76 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

slack ; but the great number of those employed in
moderately busy times draw some wages nearly
every week." The ''pound stint" was a similar
pre-war expedient in pottery. In most cases these
arrangements are based on the convenience of the
employers as well as of the employed or on tacitly-
accepted ''custom of the trade," rather than on
trade union insistence. They are interesting for
the present purpose as the basis of experience
from which have come two conscious movements
toward control, — the one toward the use of short
time against reductions of pay on account of over-
production, best illustrated by the ' ' Miners ' Four
Days" and the great cotton dispute of 1878 (see
Section XVIII below) ; the other the extensive
propaganda for shortening hours to absorb the
unemployed. The last idea has been behind many
of the demands for shorter hours made since Mr.
Tom Mann's speaking tour in 1911. The Miners'
claim for the six hour day was urged partly on
this ground; and the "40-hour movement" in en-
gineering, which boiled over in the Clyde and Bel-
fast strikes early in 1919 and is simmering in the
other districts, is based on this theory. "They
have come into the strike to abolish unemploy-
ment, ' ' said the Clyde Strike Bulletin. This is an
item in the current propaganda of the shop
stewards' movement, though one at least of its
leaders thinks that, even after they had won their

UNEMPLOYMENT 77

30 or 40-liour week and absorbed the present crop
of unemployed, they would "never have to go
back." The most workmanlike attempt to write
into an actual agreement this notion of reducing
hours to meet unemployment is in the proposed
new rules for the Coventry district of the engi-
neering industry: —

"When the unemployed list reaches 2^% [of the
union membership], the above hours shall be reduced
by one hour per week, and if 5% of unemployment is
reached the hours shall be reduced by 2(^ hours per
week. If more than 5% are at any time unemployed,
the unions reserve the right to take any reduction of
hours they consider necessary."

It is no longer true that, as the Webbs stated in
1897, "wisely or unwisely, the Trade Unions have
tacitly accepted the principle that the capitalist
can only be expected to find them wages so long
as he can find them work. " In a number of trades,
there has been a movement toward forcing the
employer to make it his business to regularize
work or, failing that, to "make unemployment
[that is, the maintenance of the unemployed] a
charge on the industry. ' ' In its simplest form this
is merely an objection on the part of a number of
trade unions to the practice of keeping their mem-
bers waiting without pay at the employer's con-
venience on the chance that work may be found

78 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

for them. The demands put forward in October,
1919, by the National Union of Railwaymen and
the Transport Workers Federation on behalf of
the coal- tippers include the provision: —

**A11 men shall be paid waiting time at the rate of
2/6d. per mail per hour or part of an hour in all eases. ' '

Various unions have been able to establish the
principle of guaranteed time, — that is, that if a
worker is hired at all he must be assured a full
day's or week's work or, failing that, full pay for
the period. The Manchester Carters won in 1911
an agreement that ''all carters employed at or
before 9 a. m. shall be paid a day's pay." The
Boot and Shoe agreement of February 13, 1919,
contains an elaborate stipulation that with certain
exceptions, ''where operatives attend at the fac-
tories on the instruction of the employers . . .
work shall be found for them for at least half a
day ... or they shall be paid ... at not less than
the minimum or agreed wage rate." A rule pro-
posed by the Manchester building trades unions
reads : —

"Six hours per day shall be the minimum time paid
to men who attend on the job up to 9 a.m. and remain
on the job during the day, or until told by the manage-
ment they may leave."

The Compositors on the London newspapers have
daily guarantees of at least two galleys (approxi-

UNEMPLOYMENT 79

mately 7 hours' work). The Glass Bottle Makers
have a guaranteed weekly rate or, in some districts,
the guarantee of enough metal to allow them to
make the weekly rate. Of the other old crafts, the
Hand Papermakers are guaranteed **six days'
custom" and the Flint Glass Makers ^'eleven
moves a week" (33 hours) . Finally, the first item
in the terms of settlement with the National Union
of Railwaymen in March, 1919, reads : —

"The standard week's wages, exclusive of any over-
time or Sunday duty, to be guaranteed to all employees
who are available for duty throughout the week."

Guaranteed time by the day or week has been a
definite part of trade union policy. A further ex-
tension of the idea is guaranteed time all the year
round. This is what is meant by the phrase ''un-
employment a charge on the industry" which Mr.
B. Williams (The First Year's Working of the
Liverpool Docks Scheme) explains as follows: —

"If a reserve of labor is required by any industry,
then that industry should maintain that reserve not
only when working, but also when it is unavoidably un-
employed."

The idea does not necessarily involve any ele-
ment of workers' control. Mr. Williams was writ-
ing from the viewpoint of a government official,
and in at least one case responsibility toward its

80 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

unemployed has been assumed by a powerful
trust. The Bradford Dyers' Association agreed
in 1907, ''that to the men displaced from any cause
whatever during the year the Association shall
pay an amount equal to and in addition to that
paid under their out-of-work benefit by the So-
ciety." But the most important experiment in
this direction — that of the Cotton Control Board
during the war — was much more to the present
point. It involved both partial trade union re-
sponsibility for the policy of the scheme and com-
plete trade union responsibility for administration
of the unemployment benefit. The lack of ship-
ping, due to the submarine campaign and the di-
version of tonnage to war purposes, had caused
an acute shortage of raw cotton and widespread
unemployment in the industry. The Cotton Con-
trol Board, with representatives of the Board
of Trade, the cotton merchants and manufac-
turers, and the cotton trade unions, was estab-
lished in June, 1917, with broad powers to
deal with the emergency. There were two main
problems to be considered: — the allocation to
the various manufacturers of their share of
the limited supply of material, and the provision
for the maintenance of the unavoidably unem-
ployed. The first problem was dealt with by fixing
the purchase price of raw cotton and by allowing
manufacturers to run only certain percentages of

UNEMPLOYMENT 81

their machinery. To meet the unemployment
problem, a fund was created by a levy upon the
manufacturers who exceeded their percentage of
machines; this fund was used as unemployment
pay under principles laid down by the Control
Board; its actual administration, both to union
members and to the few non-unionists, was left
solely (with the trifling exception of a few out-
lying villages) to the trade unions. For a part of
the first year of the Control Board's work and
during the sharpest crisis, the industry ran on
what was called the ''rota*' system — work for four
weeks and the fifth week a holiday with pay pro-
vided by this levy upon the industry; this was
finally given up in order that the surplus labor
might be drained off to the making of munitions ;
but the general policy of making necessary unem-
ployment a charge on the industry was maintained
throughout the war. The importance of the work
of the Cotton Control Board as a case in which
trade union representatives shared, at least nomin-
ally, in the determining of trade policy will be
discussed in Section XVIII. Its importance for
the present subject lies not only in its actual steps
for meeting unemployment but in the partial con-
trol by the workers in planning those steps and in
their complete control over a part of the adminis-
tration.
It will be noticed, however, that even the most

82 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

elaborate of these expedients, except perhaps the
little flying squadron of Stuff Pressers, are di-
rected toward the end, not of decreasing irregu-
larity of employment but merely of distributing
more equally the incidence of its hardships. If
there is any effect on the reducing of the fluctua-
tions themselves, it is only the indirect but impor-
tant one of making it worth the employer's while
to plan to that end. In general the problems of
** business cycles" and the like have been left as
obviously beyond the reach of what little control
the trade unions have secured over industry.

It is the more interesting, then, to examine the
few instances in which the trade unions have taken
a part or an interest in attempts at the regular-
izing of employment as distinct from the mere
mitigation of the evils of unemployment. Attempts
to regularize employment may be divided into
those which begin from the end of regularizing
the supply of labor and those which begin from
the end of regularizing the demand for labor.
The history of the attempts in the former direc-
tion falls largely outside the scope of the present
study. The trade unions have played little part
in it, and most organized schemes of this sort are
attempts to secure for unskilled workers the sort
of regularity of employment which trade union
"limitation of numbers" (which will be discussed
in the next section) in part secures for certain

UNEMPLOYMENT 83

skilled workers. De-casualization, the policy
which Mr. (now Sir) W. H. Beveridge defined*
as follows: — ''that all the irregular men for each
group of similar employers should be taken on
from a common center or Exchange, and that this
Exchange should so far as possible concentrate
employment upon the smallest number that will
suffice for the work of the group as a whole,'*
was an invention of reformers from outside in-
dustry, as an attempt primarily to solve the
problem of irregular dock labor. The most
famous attempts at putting it into practice,
those which substituted some degree of regulari-
zation for the hideous scramble for work at the
London Docks,^ made no provision for trade
union activity. More recent attempts, however,
have used the trade unions at least in a sort of
junior partnership. The Liverpool Docks Scheme,
an attempt to reduce the necessary surplus of dock
labor to the minimum by a system of registration
of workers and central clearing houses and call-
stands,' was started in 1913 as a government un-
dertaking, but from the first provided for a joint
committee of employers and trade union repre-
sentatives to supervise its working, and one of the
rules was to the effect that : —

* Unemployment: a Problem of Industry, p. 201.
*Ihid., pp. 81-95.

• For details, see R. Williams, The First Year's Working of
the Liverpool Docks Scheme.

84 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

"Employers shall issue a Registration Card to any
man who produces liis Dockers Union Membership Card
stamped by the Branch Office to which he belongs."

It is clear, however, that this degree of control
was given to the trade union in order to secure
its co-operation with the scheme and does not
represent real initiative on the part of the workers
to prevent unemployment. In fact the government
official who carried out the scheme speaks of the
initial "diffidence" of both employers and em-
ployed and tells the story of a strike of dock
laborers against the scheme.

Similar schemes are now in force in a number of
other ports and in some cases involve much more
positive trade union activity. In many of the
ports where all men employed are union members
registration is left in the hands of the union as
agents for the Port Labor Joint Committee — in
some cases union badges are even used as the
tallies. And, although there has been in certain
ports trade union opposition, a number of trade
union leaders, notably Mr. Ernest Bevin of the
Bristol Dockers, have themselves been active in
the devising of the schemes to lessen unemploy-
ment. The trade unions, then, have played at
least an acquiescent and in some cases an active
part in certain attempts to regularize the supply
of labor.

UNEMPLOYMENT 85

On the other question, the attempt to regularize
the demand for labor, the trade unions have again
assumed only a slight degree of control. There
are occasional instances of joint attempts to solve
particular problems of shortage of work. It is
not at all uncommon for a trade union official in
the course of his ordinary work to discuss with an
employer ways and means of avoiding a stoppage
of work that will throw his members out of em-
ployment. Similar matters are occasionally dis-
cussed by works committees. The Ministry of
Labor's report on Works Committees * speaks of
committees of building trades shop stewards
which "may make representations to, or be con-
sulted by, the employer on questions such as the
proper allocation of work in order that sufficient
inside operations may be reserved for wet
weather" (p. 40), and of a works committee in
a shipbuilding yard which considered among other
matters, " unemployment questions — e.g., the
purchase by the firm of an old vessel so as to
employ idle men, and subscription to an unem-
ployed fund" (p. 95).

These of course are minor and immediate ex-
pedients and the great question of trade fluctua-
tions is naturally almost untouched by trade union
activity. Political Labor, with which this inquiry
has little to do, has given some attention to the

* See Note on Sources.

86 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

carefully thought out suggestion of Professor
Bowley, taken up by Mr. and Mrs. Webb and em-
bodied in the Minority Report of the Poor Law
Commission (1908) and in ''Labor and the New
Social Order," of spraying work from a public
reservoir to counteract trade fluctuations. An ex-
pression of this policy in trade union activity has
been the strenuous protest by the trade unions
affected against the wholesale discharge from Na-
tional Factories and Dockyards since the armistice,
on the ground that the Government should convert
the establishments to some sort of useful work in
a time of unemployment.

An ambitious recent project attempts to combine
the four principles just discussed: — ^unemploy-
ment a charge on the industry, trade union admin-
istration of unemployment pay so provided, regu-
larization of the supply of labor, and regulariza-
tion of the demand for labor — in a single scheme
intended to be carried out jointly by employers and
employed in a great industry. The Joint Indus-
trial Council for the Building Industry had placed
in its constitution the "Prevention of Unemploy-
ment" as one of its objects. It had appointed a
sub-committeee to consider the more efficient
organization of the industry. At the annual meet-
ing of the Council, held August 14 and 15, 1919,
this Committee presented a report — ^known as the
''Foster Report" from Mr. Thomas Foster, the

UNEMPLOYMENT 87

chairman, a master-decorator of Burnley — on
* ' Organized Public Service in the Building Indus-
try, " ^ a document which was signed by all the
workers on the Committee and three of the em-
ployers, five employers dissenting. The report
was debated at length and, after a definitely hostile
amendment had been voted down, was referred
back to the same Conmiittee for reconsideration
and elaboration. The Eeport covers a wide range
of subjects which will be referred to in later sec-
tions— the problem of unemployment, however,
takes first place in the arrangement of the report
and apparently in the minds of its supporters
from the operatives' side. ''Fear of unemploy-
ment" is stated as the first cause of restriction
of output. The remedies may be quoted under the
headings given above. In charging necessary un-
employment to the expense of the industry and in
entrusting the trade unions with administering
the benefit, the report follows the practice of the
Cotton Control Board. The significant passages
are as follows: —

"15. "When all other methods of providing steady
and adeqnate employment for the operatives have been
exhausted, then the Industry is faced with the question
of its responsibility towards its employees during pos-
sible periods of unemployment. We are convinced that
the overhanging fear of unemployment must be finally

■ See Note on Sources.

88 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

removed before the operative can be expected whole-
heartedly to give of his best. .' . .

17. — We further recommend that in cases of unavoid-
able unemployment, the maintenance of its unemployed
members shall be undertaken by the Industry through its
Employment Committees, and that the necessary revenue
shall be raised by means of a fixed percentage on the
wages bill, and paid weekly to the Employment Com-
mittee by each employer on the joint certificate of him-
self and a shop steward or other accredited trade union
representative.

19. — While the collection of this revenue should be
carried out by the Employment Committees, the pay-
ments should be made by periodical refund to the trade
unions, who would thus become an important integral
part of the official machinery and would distribute the
unemployment pay in accordance with the regulations
prescribed by the Industrial Council and its Com-
mittees. ' '

The question of regularizing the supply of
labor, which was at the same time being incident-
ally considered by the Resettlement Committee of
the same Council, was touched on as follows : —

"42. — It is obvious that the important improvements
we have outlined will tend to make service in the In-
dustry more attractive; and while the interests of the
public service emphatically demand the enrollment of
every member who can be trained and utilized in the
Building Industry, we fully recognize that indiscriminate
enrollment must be prevented by careful regulation.

43. — We therefore recommend that the development

UNEMPLOYMENT 89

of the Industry should be kept under constant review by
the Employment Committees, and that these Committees
should periodically notify the trade unions as to the
number of new members that may apply for registration
under the Employment Scheme, after a suitable trade
test or evidence of previous service in the Industry.

16. — . . . The machinery for filling vacancies already
exists in the trade union organization and should be
developed to the greatest possible extent, in order to
supplement the State Employment Exchanges so far as
the Building Industry is concerned."

The most elaborate and far-reaching proposals
have to do with the regularization of demand, by
the planning of public work to counteract trade
depressions and by dove-tailing with other indus-
tries to counteract seasonal unemployment. The
report reads as follows: —

**9. — . . . We consider it essential that the whole
productive capacity of the Industry should be continu-
ously engaged and absorbed, and that a regular flow
of contracts should replace the old haphazard alterna-
tions of congestion and stagnation.

It is well known that the proportion of public to
private work is very considerable and that it is well
within the powers of Public Authorities to speed up or
to delay contracts. We therefore recommend: —

(a) That the Industrial Council shall set up a
permanent committee entitled the Building
Trades Central Employment Committee, with
the necessary clerical staff.

90 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

(b) That each Regional Council shall similarly set

up a Building Trades Regional Employment
Committee.

(c) That each Local or Area Council shall similarly

set up a Building Trades Area Employment
Committee.

(d) That each Committee shall consist of an equal

number of employers and operatives with
one architect appointed by the local pro-
fessional Association of Architects or by the
Royal Institute of British Architects as may
be most appropriate.
10. — The first duty of these Committees would be to
regularize the demand for building: —

(a) at the approach of slack periods, by accelerat-

ing new building enterprises, both public and
private, with the co-operation of architects
and local authorities;

(b) conversely, at periods of congestion, by advis-

ing building owners to postpone the construc-
tion of such works as are not of an urgent
character. . . .
13.— . . . The difficulty of providing employment
during wet and bad seasons has yet to be faced. We
feel that a certain amount of investigation is still needed
in this direction, and venture to suggest that the Build-
ing Trades Industrial Council should approach the re-
presentatives of other industries with a view to investi-
gating the possibility of 'dove-tailing' or seasonal inter-
change of labor.

There would appear to be a large volume of national
and private work which could be undertaken when the
Industry itself could not usefully employ all its avail-
able labor, for example: —

UNEMPLOYMENT 91

(a) Afforestation.

(b) Road-making.

(c) The preparation of sites for housing schemes.

(d) Demolition of unsanitary or condemned areas

in preparation for improvements."

)
The Foster Report is of course only in the dis-
cussion stage ; it is, however, of great interest as
the most elaborate plan for joint action against
unemployment being seriously debated by employ-
ers and employed. In the field of already accom-
plished fact, the instances of any degree of work-
ers' control over unemployment problems are of
two sorts. There are first the numerous rules by
which the trade unions exert pressure upon em-
ployers to distribute work equally and to plan
against unemployment. Of these the principle of
guaranteed time is the furthest development. In
the second place there have been the exercise by
trade unions of administrative functions in con-
nection with jointly controlled attempts to meet
the problem of unemployment. Of these the Cot-
ton Control Board and the Dock Clearing House
schemes are the only important examples.

« THE RIGHT TO A TRADE "

The trade union control studied in the preceding
sections dealt almost entirely with the quantitative
regulation of employment or with the condition
of union membership. There still remain the quali-
tative restrictions on employment — the attempts
of the unions to say what class of workman shall
be set to do a particular sort of job.

Apprenticeship — the limiting of work in a par-
ticular trade or on a particular process to men who
have served a specified term of years as learn-
ers of the trade — is the most talked-of restriction
of this nature. But perhaps the most important
thing to say about it is how little of it there really
is. Even in 1897, the Webbs emphasized this by
the following table {Industrial Democracy, p. 473,
footnote) : —

(1) Membership of Trade Unions actually en-

forcing apprenticeship regulations .... 90,000

(2) Membership of Trade Unions nominally

retaining apprenticeship regulations,

but effectively open 500,000

92

" THE RIGHT TO A TRADE " 93

(3) Membership of Trade Unions having no
apprenticeship regulations :—

a. Transport workers and

laborers 250,000

b. Textile, mining, and

other occupations . . . 650,000 900,000

1,490,000

A few moments' figuring will show that their
argument now holds a fortiori; that the proportion
of the trade union movement in class (3) is at the
present time much greater than when the Webbs
wrote. Class (3) (a) in 1915 would have included
under transport workers (738,000) and common
labor (including builders' laborers — 789,000) more
than a million and a quarter workers. Adding to
this the 857,000 engaged in mining, the 258,000
shop assistants, clerks, and employees of public
authorities and the 500,000 in the textile industry
(from which, however, a few minor sections should
be subtracted) the figures come to 2,850,000 with-
out any attempt to study the smaller trades ; and
a detailed investigation would surely show that
many more than three million out of the 4,126,793
members reported in 1915 were in unions not even
claiming apprenticeship regulations. Even this
fails to weight the figure sufficiently, since it is
precisely in general labor and women's labor that
trade unionism has grown most rapidly since 1915.

94) THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Fully as striking for the purpose is the break-
down of what was left of apprenticeship in the
trades classified by the Webbs under (2). The
numbers of trade unionists in these trades is now
greater, but the importance of apprenticeship in
them has greatly dwindled. The Webbs spoke
then of the *' complete collapse" of apprentice-
ship regulations in engineering — a phrase which
unfortunately leaves little room for describing the
changes both before and during the war by which
the industry was invaded by dilutees who were
taught one process alone and were used on repeti-
tion work.

Apprenticeship, then, is no longer of first-class
importance in the greater industries ; ^ but it is
still worth while to notice what degree of control
it involves. This is of two sorts — the limitation
of numbers and a certain command over technique
and training in technique. The first is no doubt
the more important object of the regulations;
limitation of entry means monopoly and there-
fore high wages and some security of employment,
and a much more considerable basis for control
than even the compulsory trade unionism referred
to in the third section. The power of the Stuff
Pressers rests largely on the regulation which

* An incidental indication of this is the fact that the word
" apprenticeship " does not appear in the index of G. D, H.
Cole's Introduction to Trade Unionism.

" THE RIGHT TO A TRADE " 95

limits apprentices to a proportion of one to ten
journeymen, though even in this extreme case the
union finds it sometimes necessary to admit men
who have not served their time. This is of inter-
est for this inquiry merely in so far as it becomes
a means for securing further control — for our
purpose it is more interesting to study the few
instances in which apprenticeship means some con-
trol by the union over the education of the worker
in his trade.

Probably every trade that retains apprentice-
ship retains some degree of control over the train-
ing of apprentices, if only, as with the Glasgow
Bakers, to the extent "that the Operatives' Com-
mittee have power to make inquiry so as to ascer-
tain that the apprentice is not an underpaid
journeyman." Often, however, this means a cer-
tain control over the actual training the appren-
tice receives — if not positive control in the sense
of directing the training, at least negative control
in the sense of effective complaint when the em-
ployer fails too signally to give the apprentices a
full chance to learn the trade. The Power Loom
Overlookers (wool), for example, will fight the
issue of the proper training of an apprentice. The
monthly form which the "father of the chapel"
(the printers' shop steward) fills out for his union
contains a space for reporting a failure to give
apprentices a fair chance to learn the trade. In

96 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

one old-fashioned monopoly craft, in which the
employing side admits that "the unions have
earned supremacy over the question," the union
exhorts its members to ''intelligently study the
handicraft" and claims in dignijQed language the
right to protest against the choice of unfit appren-
tices, which in practice means a veto power on
their selection. The handful of ''potters' paint-
ers," the most skilled workers in the potting in-
dustry, claimed and won the right to fill the latest
vacancy in their craft. Much more striking is the
rule of the Britannia Metal Smiths, one of the tiny
archaic unions of the Sheffield light trades, which
requires : —

"That every boy on completing his apprenticeship
shall be reported upon by the men working at the firm
as to his abilities, before he is accepted by the Trade.
If it be found that the said boy is incompetent as a work-
man, the Committee shall institute an enquiry and, if
possible ascertain the cause, and take the necessary steps
to prevent a similar misfortune."

There are several instances of joint control
over apprenticeship. An extract from an arbi-
trator's award, dated 1909, shows the situation
among the Bookbinders: —

"It being further agreed by the employers . . . that
the apprentices be trained not merely in a sub-section

« THE RIGHT TO A TRADE " 97

but in a branch. Evidence was given me as to the
technical training of apprentices at technical classes and
as to the desire of the employers to co-operate with the
societies in encouraging and improving the apprentices'
training. ' '

The 1916 report of the London Society of Com-
positors welcomes the adoption of a joint scheme
**for the better education of the printer's appren-
tice" with the following remarks: —

"The training of apprentices has long been regarded
as a matter of supreme importance both to the Society
and to the trade at large . . . The apprentice is not
only the journeyman of the future; he is the trade
unionist of the future. Our effort, then, should be to
make him a better printer and a better man, and there-
fore a better member."

Since the Joint Industrial Council of the building
industry announced that one of its objects was
''to arrange for adequate technical training for
the members of the industry, ' ' there has been some
activity in planning toward that end. One scheme,
originated by Mr. Frank Woods, a Bolton builder,
and already approved by the Joint Council for the
North Western Area, provides an elaborate plan
of training under supervision of a committee rep-
resenting (1) the employers' association, (2) the
unions, (3) the Education Authority, and (4) the
Juvenile Employment Committee of the Ministry
of Labor, which shall deal both with the selection

98 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

of apprentices and with complaints either as to
their misconduct or as to the employer's failure
to teach the trade. ''Those employers who shirk
their duties and do not train apprentices will have
to be dealt with, ' ' the argument runs ; but * ' I am
strongly against State interference. I would
rather trust to joint control and joint action to
remedy this defect."

The claim of a craft union to some control over
training in the technique of the craft is only one
manifestation of its feeling that, as a body of men
possessing a special skill, it possesses a certain
** right to a trade" comparable, and in fact com-
pared in the constitution of the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers,'' to the right belonging to the
holder of a doctor's diploma. This ''right" in-
volves two principles (1) that the tradesman shall
be asked to do only his own sort of work and (2)
that no other w^orkman shall do the tradesman's
sort of work. The first principle has been some-
what obscured by the sharp conflict over appren-
ticeship, demarcation, and dilution, which involve
the second issue; but it is worth noticing as in-
dicating the background of the second claim. Even
in as loosely-organized an industry as pottery, the
union will usually back a man who refuses to do
work other than that for which he was hired.

* Which corresponds roughly to the International Association
of Machinists.

« THE RIGHT TO A TRADE " 99

The demarcation^ issue, both because of. its
practical importance to the organization of the
trade union world and because the principle of the
right to a trade is most plainly seen when two
rights to a trade meet head on, is usually taken as
the illustration of this right. Two trades claim a
monopoly of a particular job — e.g. **the whole of
the fitting up and repairing of the Downton
pumps" — ^based on what is for all intents and pur-
poses a property right to their ** means of living."
The fierceness with which these disputes are
fought cannot entirely be explained on the basis
of wages, though there is always the fear that the
job will go to the union with the lower rate. * ' The
whole question from our point of view is one of
wages," said Mr. George Barnes, then Secretary
of the Engineers, in 1897; but the apparently
reasonable suggestion that the issue be solved by
setting a rate for the disputed job and letting the
employer choose a man from either or any union
does not seem to solve the difficulty. It leaves un-
touched the fear of unemployment, which ''gives
most of the bitterness to the troublesome demarca-
tion disputes among the different crafts,"* and
also whatever may be left of the old feeling of
craft- right and the craftsman's distaste for seeing

•The familiar American term is "jurisdictional dispute."
* Sidney Webb, The Restoration of Trade Union Covditiont,
p. 69. .

100 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

somebody else do what he is trained to do. The
issue is by no means a settled one — one former
trade union oflBcial even said that ''the trade union
movement spends a third of its energy on demar-
cation"— but it may be left at one side in this
discussion. Disputes over demarcation are not an
extension of workers ' control but a division of it,
and they are to the point merely as making ex-
plicit the feeling of a craft's prescriptive "right
to earn its bread without the interference of out-
siders, ' ' which is at the base of many of the regu-
lations of the more exclusive trades.

Dilution — or the replacing of skilled men by less
skilled men or women — is at the moment an even
more serious problem. It will be considered again
in the sections on "Technique," but the objection
to dilution is worth mentioning here as exhibiting
again the feeling of the right to the trade. This
is a case not of craft against craft but of craft
against unskilled and woman labor, and the same
fear of an inrush of numbers into the trade and
the consequent danger of unemployment is even
more strongly marked. "Do I feel that the man
on the next machine is competing for my job!"
writes Mr. J. T. Murphy." " Do I feel that the
vast army who have entered into industry will
soon be scrambling with me at the works gates for
a job in order to obtain the means of a livelihood!

* The Workers' Committee, p. 1.

" THE RIGHT TO A TRADE " 101

My attitude towards the dilution of labor will
obviously be different to the man who is not likely
to be subject to such an experience." Limitation
of entry is in part, as was suggested in the last
section, an attempt to bulwark the workers al-
ready in the trade against unemployment. It is
in those terms that Mr. Bradshaw, the secretary
of the National Federation of Building Trades
Operatives, argues ® against an indiscriminate ex-
pansion of the supply of building labor :

* * Some of us know what it is to walk about the streets
with nothing to do. What will happen when the boom
in building comes to an end? We shall be willing to
let people come into our trade if we have proper safe-
guards ; if, in other words, the Government will guaran-
tee them and us continued employment, or alternatively
adequate maintenance. If the dread of future unem-
ployment were removed, it would go a long way to
remove objections to 'expansion.' We have the oppor-
tunity now to make ourselves reasonably safe, and it is
only natural that we should take advantage of it. . . .
In the past we have worked on a building knowing that
as soon as it was finished we should be out of work.
. . . Guarantee our employment, and there will be no
trouble in getting the houses."

The fear of unemployment is common to these
regulations. But in the case of dilution the wage

• Interview quoted in the London Timet, July 4, 1919.

102 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

element is even more important than in the case
of demarcation. The fear is not only that skilled
jobs may become harder to get, the great fear is
that all skill will lose its market value. The in-
terest in the dilution problem is not the interest
in a new form of control. Dilution is interesting
as a symptom of the end of an old form of control.
It calls attention to the fact thai/ the current move-
ments in industrial technology are running directly
counter to the type of control studied in this sec-
tion. Apprenticeship and similar regulations are
in the main survivals from the handicraft tech-
nique or at least from an earlier form of the
machine technique. They are not only confined to
a small fraction of industry; even there they are
giving ground before the standardization of the
most typical modem machine production. ** Every
simplification in the methods of production," says
Mr. Murphy in the pamphlet quoted, *' every im-
provement in automatic machine production,
every application of machinery in place of hand
production means that the way becomes easier for
others to enter the trades."

The issues of dilution and particularly the in-
troduction of women labor raise highly interesting
problems, but it is unnecessary to consider them
further in a study of this kind. That sort of con-
trol which merely means keeping other people out
of a job may be of high importance as a basis for

« THE RIGHT TO A TRADE » 103

further extensions of control; in itself it involves
little or no direction of industry. It is moreover
just this sort of control which is becoming less
and less possible with the modernization of in-
dustry.

VI

« THE RIGHT TO SACK "

**The control I want is over the employer's right
to sack a man."

That remark of a Sheffield shop steward, a re-
mark the more pointed because many of his fellow
shop stewards were at the time walking the streets
in search of work, expresses a demand for security
of tenure, not only against dismissals due to bad
trade, but also against disciplinary dismissals and
particularly against dismissals for the punishment
of men exceptionally active as labor leaders.*
That is, it is a demand for protection against what
the British workers call ** victimization" — of de-
fence for the man, ''who by reason of continuous
activity in forwarding the cause of the Union is
dismissed" (rules of Boot and Shoe Operatives),
or "who has been victimized, on account of being
ever ready to fight for the interests of himself
and his fellow members" (rules of Steel Smel-
ters). Victimization, or at least the suspicion
of it, is very widespread. * * The workmen are ever

* In practice, the distinction between dismissals due to bad
trade and dismissals for union activity is not a clear one. A
time of depression may be made the occasion for a general
clearing-out of " agitators."

104

"THE RIGHT TO SACK" 105

conscious of the power of the employers to sack
them. ' ' ^ Even among the miners, for all their
industrial power and for all their willingness to
use it on a personal issue, there are continual com-
plaints of victimization. A working collier in the
Midlands writes of ''the invisible insecurity of
work, " ' ' a kind of victimization which you cannot
prove" — "where men stood by their comrades
they were soon out of work, not knowing what
for."

For our purpose, the interesting thing is not
that victimization is practised,^ or the highly
controversial point as to just how much of it there
is, but rather the efforts made by the trade unions
to prevent it — efforts which have in fact though
not in form amounted to a considerable control
over the power of dismissal.

The importance of the issue, as felt by the labor
extremists, is indicated by a quotation from the
Miners' Next Step: * —

"Grievances are not questions, with us, so much of
numbers as of principles. It might, and probably would
be, deemed advisable to have a strike of the whole organi-
zation to defend one man from victimization. ' '

The importance of the issue, as expressed in
trade union action, is indicated by the number of

* J. T. Murphy, The Workers' Committee, p. 6.

* The American Association of University Professors would
testify that it is not unknown in colleges.

* See Note on Sources.

106 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

strikes called to secure the reinstatement of dis-
charged workpeople. In 1913 there were 117
strikes on this issue, directly involving 25,000
workpeople ; in 1911 and 1912 approximately 16,000
were involved each year.^ In the summer of 1918,
20,000 workers took part in a single strike at a
London aircraft factory as a protest against the
discharge of a woman shop steward and the chair-
man of shop stewards.® An amusing recent in-
stance is the strike of Black Country colliery en-
ginemen that was settled in June, 1919, on the
single condition ''that the dismissed engineman be
reinstated for an hour. ' ' An indication of the ex-
tent of control over dismissals exercised by the
trade unions in this manner, without any sort of
agreement, is given in the evidence before the
Coal Commission of Mr. Hugh Bramwell, repre-
senting the South Wales coal-owners: —

"Minor strikes of workmen on this question are not
uncommon. A manager knows he cannot be unjust
without risking the stoppage of the mine — consequently
when he does act, he does so under a sense of responsi-
bility."'

■ The Government Report on Strikes and Lockouts does not
give separate figures for reinstatement cases for tliose years,
but estimates tliat they were " nearly one-half " of the cases
under the heading of " Employment of particular classes or
persons":— 1911, 170 disputes, 32,639 people; 1912, 179 dis-
putes, 34,985 people. See Note on Sources.

• Furnishing Trades Association Monthly Report, August, 1918.

» Cd. 360, p. 874.

" THE RIGHT TO SACK " 107

There have been a few attempts either to ex-
press in written agreement this trade union check
over the right of dismissal or to set up some joint
body for settling disputed cases. The rules of the
conciliation board of the Leicester dyeing trade
contain under the head of "Freedom of Work-
people" what is at least a pious expression of
opinion against victimization: —

"That all workmen delegates shall be as free as
employers to express their opinion without fear or
favor; and no workman shall be dismissed from his
employment for any action he may take on the Board."

A dispute over the discharge of a shop steward
at one of the Vickers munition works was settled
through the Ministry of Munitions, on the follow-
ing terms: —

"(1) The steward to be reinstated and full inquiry
into procedure afterwards.

"(2) That in future cases of proposed dismissal of
stewards or local trade union officials, notice of appeal
shall be given to the management within 48 hours. The
management to hear the case within a further 48 hours ;
failing agreement the question to be dealt with by the
trade union officials and the Employers' Association
within 7 days if possible."

The Government's Commission on Industrial
Unrest (1917) in its report on South Wales recom-
mended:—

108 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

"That every employee should be guaranteed what we
may call 'security of tenure' — that is, that no workman
should be liable to be dismissed except with the consent
of his fellow workmen as well as his employer."

The report on Works Committees issued by the
Ministry of Labor gives several instances in which
^'alleged unjust dismissals'' are discussed by joint
committees, although at least two employers who
experimented in this direction found that their
shop stewards' committees preferred not to dis-
cuss beforehand disciplinary discharges, in order
that they might avoid responsibility. Messrs.
Reuben Gaunt & Sons, Ltd., a firm of Yorkshire
worsted spinners, have recently gone beyond the
stage of joint discussion to that of actual joint
decision on disciplinary dismissals. Any employee
has the right of appeal from discharge or punish-
ment to a body composed of equal numbers chosen
by the firm and the workers — in a recent case be-
fore this tribunal the defendant was a foreman
charged with bullying a woman worker.

It will be noticed that the last few instances,
and the suggestion of the Commission on Indus-
trial Unrest, run beyond victimization proper —
i.e. persecution for union activity — to a reference
to all cases of disciplinary dismissal. 'The same
is true of the reinstatement strikes. Victimiza-
tion is only a special case under the issues of sup-
posed personal injustice which the Unions contest.

*' THE RIGHT TO SACK »' 109

** Redress for all . . . unjust or captious and un-
lawful dismissals," is given as one of the objects
in the constitution of the British Steel Smelters.
It is in practice fought for by many other unions.
One important dispute, for example, was occa-
sioned by the discharge of a railway guard,
Richardson, for refusing to obey an order that
conflicted with the Company's printed rules — that
is, for refusing to take out a train loaded beyond
the specified capacity; his reinstatement was se-
cured by trade union pressure.^ A strike of pot-
tery workers secured the reinstatement of a man-
ager who, the men said, had been discharged for
refusing to bully his workmen.

The same principle is naturally extended to re-
ductions in rank as well as outright dismissals.
One of the most famous of all reinstatement cases
was the ''Knox Strike" of 1911 when six thousand
men on the North Eastern Railway came out, in
the words of the Government report, "for rein-
statement of an engine-driver who had been re-
duced in rank owing to alleged drunkenness off
duty for which he had been fined in the Police
Court. ' ' The papers featured the affair as a strike
for the ''right to get drunk." Finally Driver
Knox was "reinstated as a result of Home Office
Enquiry into the case." For our purpose it does

* G. D. H. Cole and R. Page Arnot, Trade Unionism on the
Railways, p. 33.

110 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

not matter much whether the Police Court or the
Home Office was the better judge of drunkenness.
The point is that the men were quick to contest a
case of what they considered an unjust punish-
ment.^

Trade union control over disciplinary dismissals
and reductions in grade — whether for ''agitation"
or other causes — is, judged by formal agreement,
very slight. By the more important test of the
effect of the readiness to strike on the issue, the
control is much more considerable. The ** em-
ployer's right to sack a man" is at least exercised
with a degree of deference to public opinion in
the workshop and to the danger of the ''one-man
strike."

* Mr. Cole and others point to this strike as the first of many
recent disputes over " discipline."

VII
PROMOTION

The trade unions have, as we have seen, taken a
share in determining the conditions under which
workers are taken on. And in defending their
members against injustice, they have taken at
least a negative share in determining the condi-
tions under which they are dismissed, disciplined
or demoted. Have they exercised any similar con-
trol over the conditions under which workers are
promoted from one grade to another?

In most cases promotion falls outside the
union's business. Trade unionism is first of all
concerned with the general standard of the entire
group; promotion is the luck of the exceptional
individual. But the answer to the question is not
an unqualified ''no/'

There are certain industries in which there is
what the Webbs call * ' regulated progression with-
in the trade" — that is, a system under which vac-
ancies within a grade are filled, if there are no men
of that grade available, by men from the grade
just below. The best example is that of the Boiler-
makers in which the holders-up may become platers
and rivetters only when no properly-apprenticed

111

112 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

members of those branches of the trade are out
of work. A similar progression is enforced by the
Steel Smelters. The Webbs made the point that,
beyond this modified seniority, in which, while the
man chosen must be from a certain group, the
choice of the most promising individual from that
group is left to the employer, the principle of
seniority does not enter into trade union policy.
**No such idea of seniority [as in the Ci\dl Ser-
vice] is to be found in the trade union regula-
tions." This is now not strictly true. In the
cotton industry there are occasional strikes
''against the alleged promotion of a piecer out
of his turn. ' ' The Railwaymen in 1911 demanded
that length of service should ''have primary con-
sideration in all cases of promotion." It is quite
in line with the Webb statement, however, that it
has been a civil service union, that of the Postal
and Telegraph Clerks (now a part of the amalga-
mated Union of Post Office Workers), that has
been most insistent in urging the establishment of
the seniority rule. Their leaders defend the prin-
ciple (which they would admit to be "finally inde-
fensible" if they were really controlling the serv-
ice) on the ground that "you don't need a Napo-
leon" for each little job.

There have been other demands, not for the
establishment of a rigid principle of seniority, but
for some sort of joint control. The Railway Re-

PROMOTION 113

view, the official organ of the National Union of
Railwaymen, argues for joint control by the crea-
tion of ** staff committees by whom all appoint-
ments and promotions should be made." The
Postal and Telegraph Clerks had been fighting
for the inclusion of promotion among the subjects
over which the Postal Joint Industrial Council
is to have jurisdiction. In 1917, a resolution was
carried at their convention that, *Hhe Association
shall have free access to the official records of its
members," in order that cases of injustice might
be contested; and, in the course of discussion, a
member remarked that he ** imagined that even
now the Executive got in cases of promotion
occasionally. ' ' Their claim is partly, though very
guardedly, met by the Provisional Joint Committee
on the Application of the Whitley Report to the
Administrative Departments of the Civil Service,
which recommended in its report of May 28,
1919, that the question of promotion should be
provided for as follows in the constitution of the
Joint Industrial Council: —

(1) The National Council should determine the
general principles governing promotion, but should not
consider individual cases.

(2) The Departmental Councils should be allowed to
"discuss any promotion in regard to which it is repre-
sented by the staff side that the principles of promotion
accepted by or with the sanction of the National Council

114 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

have been violated. To ensure satisfactory working or
this arrangement steps will have to be taken to acquaint
the staff with the nature of the accepted principles of
promotion. ' '

(3) The District and Office (or Works) Committee
are not to discuss promotion.

The rules of the Federation of Weavers* and
Overlookers' Amalgamations (cotton) attempt to
limit promotion to union members by providing,
"that no encouragement or permission shall be
given to any weaver to learn over-looking who
does not belong to his trade union." There are
occasional disputes in various industries over the
bringing in of "outsiders" to supervisory posi-
tions instead of promoting men from the particu-
lar shop. Much more interesting is a strike of the
Glass Bottle Makers "against appointment of a
manager who had not served at the trade" which
was settled by allowing the appointment to stand
but establishing the principle — "no other non-
bottle hand to be employed as manager. ' ' A strike
of Oldham Tramwaymen in 1911 "against the
employment of certain officials," etc. was settled
as follows: —

"Officials not to be dismissed, but further vacancies
to be open to the men. ' '

A similar feeling in a more important industry
is the resentment of "practical" railwaymen

PROMOTION 115

against the supervision of men who have not come
up through the ranks but have come in from out-
side with some technical training and are taught
practical railwaying by the men over whom they
are shortly to be put in authority. I have heard
this bitterness come out in a speech by a Eailway-
men's official; it may be illustrated by these ex-
tracts from the Railway Review : — ^

"The key to advancement in the railway industry
service beyond a strictly limited point is not that of
knowledge, or ability, or diligence, or a combination of
these attributes. It is rather that of relationship to
persons in high places; the public school accent; the
toney manner; a mental vision frankly and avowedly
anti-working class. . . . And since the gentry in the top
stories of the building make all the laws for those in the
basement and yet have had little or no experience of
basement life and conditions, there must necessarily be
trouble and unrest." ^

These examples show a fairly widespread feel-
ing that promotion is, to some extent, the workers*

* In quoting these I am concerned, not with the truth of the
charges made, but only with the making of the charges, as an
indication that the union considers the regulation of promotion
as within its field of action.

* It is interesting to place alongside this strenuous demand of
the railwaymen, " To abolish for ever the inhibition against pro-
motion of wages men to salaried positions," the suggestion, made
by an electrical engineer, that this same " principle of upward
mobility " of labor would be a shrewd way to " diminish the de-
mand for democratic control." It might easily be argued that
the greater upward mobility of labor in the United States, or
more accurately the tradition of past mobility and the "log cabin
to White House" careers, accounts, in part, for the slower de-
velopment of control demands on the part of American Labor.

116 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

business, but very little in the way of control, ex-
cept a few negative safeguards against merely
arbitrary promotions. The subject is not, how-
ever, complete without turning in the next section,
to the few but highly interesting cases in which
the workers take a positive part in regulating
the most significant form of promotion — the choice
of foremen.

VIII

THE CHOICE OP FOREMEN

The general question of promotion counts for
little either in present trade union policy or in a
study of control ; promotion to the position of fore-
man or to other grades whose duties involve direct
supervision is very close to the center of the prob-
lem. The immediate issues of control arise in
contact with the foreman's authority; the method
of his selection is a pivotal issue. The common
belief that no employer ever yields or divides
authority on this point is not true; it is nearly
enough true, especially in large-scale industry, to
indicate that this is a question where the control
issue might be consciously and keenly fought.

Of the few instances in which the workers play
a decisive part in the choice of foreman, the little
Stuff Pressers' Society again furnishes the best
example, though it is apparently losing its full
right of election. **The foreman," says the ac-
count already quoted, **is selected by the Society
in conjunction with the employers and men.
Formerly the men made the selection, this being
endorsed by the Society, which then recommended
the choice to tho firm; but in recent years this

117

118 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

method of procedure is to some extent falling into
abeyance, due largely to the growth in power of
the Bradford Dyers' Association. . . . The re-
lation of the foreman to the firm is mainly to act
as contractor in behalf of the men . . . Inside the
shop the foreman works at his table like the rest
of the men whenever his duties as supervisor
allow, his wages being determined on identical
grounds to that of the men except that a supple-
mentary income of 5% is paid to him by the men
for his services as supervisor. . . . This fusion
of the labor forces allows no opportunity for the
antagonism so discernible in most industries,
where the foreman acts largely as the 'watch-
dog' of the firm . . . The salient features of the
organization are, then, first a democratically con-
trolled workshop, against which principle as I
have indicated above, the Trust is threatening
attack. It has already introduced a payment to
foremen. ' '

Another small union, that of the Spindle and
Flyer Makers, has the privilege of ** nomination"
of foremen which is said really to amount to
election; and there are one or two other small
monopolistic crafts in which the men have prac-
tically their own way in the matter. The Com-
positors do not choose their own foremen; but
the ** father of the chapel," their shop steward,
performs enough supervisory functions for the

THE CHOICE OF FOREMEN 119

firm so that lie is in effect an elected snb-foreman;
and the ''clicker" chosen by a ** companionship "
or team of compositors to do their bargaining
with the firm and to allot piece work might also
be thought of as an elected supervisor — in very
much the same sense as the stuff pressers' fore-
man. But these are in reality not more than
quite natural extensions of the control easily exer-
cised by skilled gangs engaged in collective work.
**When the work is carried on, not by individual
craftsmen but by associated groups of highly
skilled wage-earners, it is practically within the
power of these groups" (to extend a remark of
the Webbs) to control the immediate workshop
arrangements. This again is not very far from
the practice of ''co-operative work" which T>. F.
Schloss defined in 1891^ as involving three
principles, of which the second is of interest
here : —

(1) Workers associated by free choice.

(2) Workers under a leader elected and removable hy
themselves.

(3) Pay divided among members of group on princi-
ples recognized by themselves as equitable.

He gave interesting examples of this practice,
but they were for the most part only on the very
fringes of "the great industry," in such indus-

^Methodg of Industrial Remuneration.

120 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

trial pockets as the Cornish tin mines, and the
practice has since his time fallen still further into
disuse. Both these examples of co-operative work
and the examples of election of foremen referred
to here are taken from a sort of industry in which
it is possible for the foreman to be a fellow- worker
with his men and to represent them in bargain-
ing as well as to supervise their work. They
amount in effect to a democratic form of sub-
contract, and together with other forms of sub-
contract they seem to be giving away before the
standardizing process of large-scale modern in-
dustry.

There is, then, some body of experience of
trade union control over the choice of foremen in
a number of the older crafts. Is there any trade
union control over the choice of foremen in ''the
great industry" itself, in the modern large-scale,
carefully- regimented industries where the strain
of superintendence is the greatest? The answer
can be almost a direct ''no." I have been able to
find no instance in which the workers in modern-
ized industry have either the recognized right of
election of foremen or the formal right of veto-
ing an unpopular selection. Instances even of
consultation over the choice are extremely rare,
even in cases where the works committees dis-
cuss a fairly wide range of subjects. Messrs.
Hans Eenold, Ltd., chain manufacturers with a

THE CHOICE OF FOREMEN 121

large factory just outside Manchester, make a
practice of announcing the choice of a foreman to
the shop stewards ' committee and explaining their
reasons for it before publication of the announce-
ment. Messrs. Rowntree & Sons, Ltd., at their
cocoa works at York, allow this discussion to take
place before the decision is actually reached and
(presumably) allow it to influence the decision.
Their precise rule on this point, which was adopted
by their Works Council in the spring of 1919
after the workers ' side had brought in a proposal
which came much nearer direct election, is as
follows : —

' ' That before any person is appointed as an overlooker,
the name of such person shall be submitted to a Com-
mittee of the workers on the Department Council, but
the final decision regarding the appointment will con-
tinue to rest with the Director of the Department. ' '

These very minor exceptions are perhaps chiefly
of importance as showing how definite a princi-
ple it is in the constitutional theory of modern
industry — if there is any such thing — that the
workers are excluded from any control over the
choice of their supervisors.

It is impossible, however, to break oif the dis-
cussion at this point for two reasons: — First,
there is already an organized opposition to this
theory — the desire for a say in the choice of fore-
men is a serious factor in the demands of labor.

122 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Second, the theory, like other constitutional
theories, in practice does not at all work out to
the letter— the workers have now more say in the
choice of foremen than any formal agreement sug-
gests. The best evidence on the first point — that
the choice of foremen has already become to some
extent an open question — is the discussion in the
Works Committees report of the Ministry of
Labor : —

"The appointment of foremen is a question on which
there may be said to be three groups of opinions. Many
employers hold that it is purely a management question.
The opposite extreme to this is the claim made by a con-
siderable section of Trade Unionists that the workmen
should choose their own foremen. A position inter-
mediate to these two extremes is taken up by a certain
number of employers and by a section of workpeople;
the appointment (they feel) should be made by the
management, but it should be submitted to the Works
Council before it becomes effective.' Even this intermedi-
ate position, however, is not really a common position;
there are differences of opinion as to the conditions under
which the appointment should come before the Works
Committee — that is to say, whether or not the Works
Committee should have power to veto the appointment."
(pp. 33-34)

Mr. Cole and other Guild Socialists speak of the
election of foremen as *'one of the next steps."
The principle — or a step towards it — has been em-
bodied in several schemes suggested by groups

THE CHOICE OF FOREMEN 123

of workers. One suggestion now being elabo-
rated is that of a panel system — ^under which the
workers' committee should nominate a list of
candidates for a vacancy from which the employer
should choose one. Messrs. Gallacher & Paton
of the Clyde engineering shop stewards, have sug-
gested^ a system of ** collective contracts"
under which ''the Convenors of the Works
Committee and the Departmental Committee
would gradually but surely drive out and sup-
plant the Works Manager and Departmental
Foreman." Many such proposals make a dis-
tinction between officials who are primarily ''man-
managers," whose chief duty is the supervision
of workers, and those who are primarily tech-
nicians; and it is with the choice of the former
that the schemes are concerned. On the other hand,
a detailed set of proposals for the future control
of the mines, put forward by the same group of
extremists who wrote the Mmers' Next Step, in-
sists that even the definitely technical officials
should be directly elected, with the proviso that
candidates must possess the technical certificates
of qualification now necessary. "The one essen-
tial condition of our plan is the democratic elec-
tion of all officials." It is not worth while to
set out these schemes in detail at this point ; they
are referred to as an evidence of an articulate

* See below, p. 173, and Note on Sources.

124 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

opposition to the exclusion of workers from a
say in the choice of their supervisors.

It is more important to point out that the
workers do often actually exercise more power
over the choice of foremen than any agreement
suggests. At one Manchester motor works a
particularly active shop stewards' committee had
been making trouble for a succession of foremen ;
finally the firm in despair said, * ' Choose your own
foreman, then," and they did. This is only an
extreme instance of a sort of control which is not
uncommon. At the height of their power during
the war, the Clyde shop stewards, while they
claimed no right to choose foremen, could ''make
it impossible" for an unpopular foreman. The
extent to which the workers make it impossible for
foremen to whom they object — and therefore
exercise a clumsy and delayed but real and very
important veto over the choice of foremen— will
be considered in Section X. It was of veto in their
sense rather than of veto by formal right that
Mr. Cole spoke in his testimony before the Coal
Commission : —

' * The extent to which trade unions exercise an amount
of control over the selection of foremen negatively by
veto is increasing very fast." (Question 13169)

And it is this sort of veto that makes the most
important limit to the power of the employer to
select supervisors at will.

THE CHOICE OF FOREMEN 125

** Control over employers, foremen, etc. . . .
is," said D. F. ScMoss, ** aimed at by the essen-
tial principles of Trade Unionism. ' ' Yet workers '
control over foremen by direct election is practi-
cally non-existent in the great industry. This,
however, by no means exhausts all possible forms
of control in the field. There are at least two
further methods by which the workers exert con-
trol over their supervisors, — first, by pressure
through the trade union if the supervisor belongs
to the same or to a friendly union; and second,
by the refusal to work under intolerable super-
vision or objectionable supervisors. These
methods of control will be the subjects of the next
two sections.

IX

THE ORGANIZATION OF FOREMEN

The organization of foremen, like all questions of
trade union structure, is of interest for this in-
quiry only as it affects trade union function
in the direction of control. But it is evident that
the extent of control by workers over their im-
mediate supervisors depends in part on the an-
swers to the questions: — Are these supervisors
organized at all? Are they organized in the same
unions as the workers under them? Are they
organized in separate unions? And are these
last friendly or hostile to the other unions?

Trade union practice in regard to the inclusion
of foremen within the same unions as the workers
under them is varied and is complicated by a
number of motives. The ''friendly benefit" side
of trade unionism tends to hold a man in his union
after he has been promoted to the foreman's job.
Conscious trade union policy on the question has
been affected by two contradictory principles: —

Don't trust them: Capture them.

The idea behind the former is that the workman
by accepting promotion has stepped across a defi-

126

THE ORGANIZATION OF FOREMEN 127

nite line and has become the employer's man.
From that time on he is bargaining for the em-
ployer and against the worker; therefore he must
not be trusted with any news of the workers'
plans. He is the **guv'nor's man" and therefore
no longer ''safe." The natural outcome of this
feeling is to exclude foremen from the union, or at
least to let them remain only as honorary mem-
bers or for purposes of friendly benefit, as the
Glass Bottle Workers do by their rule that *'a
walking manager may remain a member of the
society, but shall not be allowed to attend any
meetings without being specially summoned."
This attitude has been the general one in the past.
** Foremen, deputies, superintendents, and the
like," writes Mr. Cole,^ "are naturally for the
most part promoted from the ranks of the Trade
Union Movement. . . It is true that throughout
the history of Trade Unionism a certain number
of such promoted workmen have retained their
connection with their Trade Unions in a more or
less private manner, by being attached to Cen-
tral Office Branches, and by other similar de-
vices ; but even where this has been the case they
have usually lost all share in the government of
their Societies."

The opposing idea is that having your foreman
in your own union is a good way of making sure

' G. D. H. Cole, An Introduction to Trade Unionitm, p. 72.

128 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

that he won't treat you unjustly. The public
opinion of the union is counted on to enforce upon
its supervising numbers a standard of decency
in the treatment of subordinates. D. F. Schloss
gave the example of the London Stevedores
where — **If a foreman does not give all the men
a fairly equal chance of employment, the trade
union committee may punish him by suspension. ' *
The Brass Workers have a definite rule for con-
trolling their foreman members ; —

"A member who is a journeyman, foreman, charge-
hand or piece worker [i.e. subcontractor] shall not have
under his control or supervision or employ any person
above the age of 18 who is not a member of the society,
and to whom he does not pay the minimum rate of the
district. ' '

A thousand Glasgow Dockers struck in 1911 on
the demand that a foreman should join the union,
and carried their point. Sub-foremen are in-
cluded in the compulsory unionism agreements
of the Dyers, and, in a number of unions — no-
tably the Dyers and Miners — it is not uncommon
for foremen and even a few managers to belong
to the men's union.

In this case the object — where there has been a
conscious object — has been to ''capture" the fore-
men for quite immediate purposes. Those who
are propagandists for extensions of workers ' con-

THE ORGANIZATION OF FOREMEN 129

trol are much more strongly in favor of the in-
clusion of foremen within the unions as a step
towards full trade union management of industry.
A correspondent writing to the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers Journal puts their argu-
ment vigorously: —

"On this point [amalgamation with the other en-
gineering unions and the control of the industry] we
are all so cordially unanimous that there seems nothing
left to do in the matter except amalgamate and take con-
trol. May I suggest that we have a long row to hoe
yet, and that we members of the A.S.E. have not yet
done all we might to strengthen our own organization.
. . . Any member of our society who, because of his
ability, is entrusted with a position of responsibility, is
no longer to be helped by the A.S.E. . . . The foremen
are being induced by employers to join subsidized
mutual organizations of one kind or another in order
to set them as a class apart from the ordinary working
trade unionist. Some of them still realize that they are
workers in the best sense of the word and have interests
in common with other producers. ... I would suggest.
Sir, that it is of the utmost importance that we should
in any measure of control of industry, have the active
support of foremen and staff men generally."

The various lines of policy taken by employers
on this question have also some bearing on the
question of control. An early policy was simply
that of forbidding membership in trade unions.
This was the attitude of the railway companies

130 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

in 1907, before the great increase in railway
unionism. It is clearly expressed in the memo-
randum from one of the companies to a certain
Inspector Rawlinson, transferring him to another
position without loss of pay: —

"As a member of the Amalgamated Society of Rail-
way Servants, you cease to be a free agent, and you can-
not be permitted to have the control and supervision of
men who are not members of the society or members of
some other society. You cannot serve two masters.
There is no desire to punish you, but the Company's
staff and the Company's business must be protected."

Even in 1911, a high official of one of the roads,
testifying before a government coromission,
threatened that ''non-unionists would have to be
chosen" for the work of some of the supervisory
clerks which was "more or less of a confidential
nature." Less drastic expressions of this feeling
are the agreements secured by the employers to
the effect that, ''The National Association of
Operative Plasterers will not take any steps to
compel men regularly employed as foremen or
superintendents to become members of the N. A.
0. P. ; " and, in bookbinding, that the Society will
not call out on strike a foreman who has held his
position for twelve months.

Another policy of certain employers has been to
encourage separate unions for foremen and other

THE ORGANIZATION OP FOREMEN 131

isupervisors by way of keeping them out of the
more dangerous trade unions. This may mean,
as it does in the engineering and heavy steel
trades, a Foremen's Benefit Society, heavily sub-
sidized by the employers, which the foremen are
urged or compelled to join. One object of this
is explained by the Vice-President of the Joint
Institute of Engineers, Mr. Alex. Richardson, in
The Mem-Power of the Nation (p. 77) : —

"So long as foremen continued trade unionists, they
could not exhibit independence, and the employers there-
fore acted wisely in establishing foremen's societies,
which conferred on members the superannuation and
other benefits they had to forfeit upon severing their
connection with the trade unions. That was a move
in the direction of inculcating habits of thought different
from those of the ordinary workmen. ' '

The same attitude may mean less definite forms
of encouragement to a separate union. The Pot-
tery Officials' and Managers' Union came about
in this way: — The operatives' society had organ-
ized a section of under-managers and foremen,
had secured a war bonus for them, and had fought
a reinstatement case for one of its manager-mem-
bers. The employers then announced that they
would be glad to recognize a separate officials'
union, and the foremen — with the exception of
those in the firm affected by the reinstatement

132 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

strike — left the workers' society and joined the
new union. The two unions are now friendly
enough; but in the Joint Industrial Council the
foremen's union has just been granted two seats,
not on the workers' side, as has been suggested
in certain other industries, not on an independ-
ent ''cross bench," as they had asked, but on the
employers' side.

The history of these two policies on the part
of employers was condensed in the deliberations
of the Provisional Joint Committee of the Na-
tional Industrial Conference, which reported on
April 4, 1919. The question of foremen came
up as an obstacle to agreement on ''full and
frank" recognition of trade unions as the basis
of negotiation. The first proposal of the em-
ployers was that workers "in positions of trust
or confidentiality" should be definitely excluded
in the recommendation for recognition of unions.
Their second proposal was that separate unions
of foremen, secretaries, etc. should be recognized
but that the right of ordinary trade unions "to
speak and act on behalf of" their foremen mem-
bers 'Should not be conceded. The Committee
nearly failed to reach unanimity but finally agreed
on the following formula: —

"The machinery [for settling disputes] should also
contain provisions for the protection of the employers'

THE ORGANIZATION OF FOREMEN 133

interests where members of trade unions of work people
are engaged in positions of trust or confidentiality, pro-
vided the right of such employers to join or remain mem-
bers of any trade union is not thereby affected."

It is, of course, by no means true that sepa-
rate unions of supervisors are always or neces-
sarily hostile to the other trade unions. The Na-
tional Foremen's Society, recently formed in the
engineering and allied trades in opposition to the
Foremen's Benefit Society, claimed in July, 1919
a membership of 2,000. Its policy is definitely
trade union and includes the obligation not to
do ''blackleg" work in case of strikes by the men
working under its members. The South Wales
Colliery Officials' Union is affiliated to the South
Wales Miners' Federation,^ although in many
districts there has been considerable friction be-
tween the Miners ' Federation and separate organ-
izations of Under-managers, Deputies, or Master
Hauliers. The Federation of Weavers * and Over-
lookers ' ^ Amalgamations in the cotton industry-
has already been mentioned as a genuine labor
alliance. In this case there is an unusual form
of control over supervision; if a woman weaver
complains of a bullying overlooker, the matter is

• Coal Commission Evidence. Question 18192.

• The overlookers in the textile industries are not strictly com-
parable to foremen in other industries. They are primarily me-
chanics and only incidentally supervisors.

134 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

adjusted between the two unions concerned. The
Power Loom Overlookers are represented on the
workers' side of the Joint Industrial Council in
the woolen trades, and a London Union of Clerical
Workers and Builders' Foremen has applied for
representation with the workers in the Building
Trades Parliament. The largest of all unions of
supervisors and clerical workers, the Railway
Clerks ' Association, which is rapidly extending its
organization into the higher grades * works as an
ally of the National Union of Eailwaymen and has
been conspicuous in demanding workers' control.
The organization of foremen, then, involves in
some cases an indirect but genuine control by the
workers over the conduct of their supervisors. Its
extension is clearly in the policy of certain groups
of workers who are consciously aiming at control.
And certain employers have attempted either to
prevent the process of organization or to divert
it into separate and exclusive channels in the fear
of just that sort of control.

* By a recent agreement between the R. C. A. and the Com-
panies there are now only some two hundred of the higher rail-
way olBcials in the country who are held to be ineligible to be
members of and be represented by the railway unions.

THE STANDARD OF FOREMANSHIP

WoRKEKs' choice of foremen is rare; the effect of
organization of foremen on workers' control is
real but indirect. The most important means by
which workers exercise control over their super-
visors is simply that of the strike or threat of
strike when supervision becomes unbearable. The
effective power of this form of control is usually
underestimated since it is difficult to detect and
define and can hardly be embodied in a formal
agreement. But in proportion to the strength of
the trade union, it represents a real veto, if not
actually over the choice, at least over the re-
tention of foremen — and a real regulation of their
actions.

Mr. R. H. Tawney sums up the situation as
"autocracy checked by insurgence;" the present
point is that there is a great deal of insurgence.
Some sense of this may be gained by going
through the official Reports on Strikes and Lock-
outs.^ In 1912 there were thirty-two disputes re-
ported as caused by objections to certain foremen ;
in 1913, 25 disputes involving 10,500 workers.

* See Note on Sources.

135

136 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

The reports of causes read like these: — '* al-
leged harassing conduct of a foreman," "alleged
tyrannical conduct of an under-forewoman,'*
** alleged overbearing conduct of officials." The
award in a recent arbitration case details the
charges against an unpopular under-manager as
** indifference to and want of consideration of
suggestions made to him by workers in connec-
tion with their work and improvements; uncivil,
inconsiderate, harsh and autocratic treatment,
and neglect to properly consider their claims as
regards both employment and remuneration; and
the preference of friends and relatives." And
among the results of the strikes, along with numer-
ous dismissals and resignations of the officials in
question, there are occasional agreements that,
* ' the men must be treated with proper respect and
threats and abusive language must not be used,"
or ''tyrannical acts to cease."

The number and the frequent success of these
strikes indicates, as was suggested in Section
VIII, a considerable trade union veto over the
choice of foremen. The ' ' right of rejecting as fel-
low-workers" may often become the right of re-
jecting as foremen. This alone, however, does not
sufficiently emphasize the amount of trade union
pressure effective in setting a standard of decent
foremanship. The rules of the British Steel
Smelters provide that members leaving on ac-

THE STANDARD OF FOREMANSHIP 137

count of "unjustifiable abuse or ill-treatment from
employer or foreman ' ' are entitled to dispute pay.
The . secretary of a union which had never suc-
ceeded in securing the dismissal of a bullying fore-
man was nevertheless sure that its protests were
effective as warnings to foremen. And in some
trades a definite standard is so much a matter of
course that the issue rarely arises. The Com-
positors, for example, will not stand for what is
known as ''policing" by foremen and managers
and any violation of the code is immediately re-
ported to the union for action. A story was told
me by a former miners' agent in Lanarkshire
illustrating a similar standard on the part of the
Scottish Miners. In a case arising under the
Minimum Wage Act, the overman was called upon
to testify whether or not a certain workman did
his work properly. The examination was as fol-
lows (in free translation from the original
Scotch) : —

Overman: "I never saw him work."

Magistrate: "But isn't it your duty under the Mines
Act to visit each working place twice a day?"

"Yes."

"Don't you do it?"

"Yes."

"Then why didn't you ever see him work?"

"They always stop work when they see an overman
coming, and sit down and wait till he's gone — even take

188 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

out their pip^ if it's a mine free from gas. They won't
let anybody watch them."

An equally extreme standard was enforced for a
part of the war period at a Clyde engineering
works. The convenor (chairman) of shop
stewards was told one morning that there was a
grievance at the smithy. He found one of the
blacksmiths in a rage because the managing di-
rector, in his ordinary morning's walk through
the works, had stopped for five minutes or so and
watched this man's fire. After a shop meeting
the convenor took up a deputation to the director
and secured the promise that it should not happen
again. At the next works meeting the convenor
reported the incident to the body of workers —
with the result that a similar standard came into
effect throughout the works, and the director
hardly dared stop at all on his morning's walk.
Much of the feeling in struggles for the recog-
nition of unions (long since secured in the better-
organized trades and conceded in principle at
least for all by the unanimous recommendations
of the National Industrial Conference) was due
to the workers' desire to have someone outside the
control of the immediate employer to represent
them on just these questions. This finds very
definite expression in the dispute that occasionally
arises over the trade union ofiicial's claim of the

THE STANDARD OF FOREMANSHIP 139

right to enter the works in order to investigate
disputes. This has been paralleled during the war
by the frequent claim of the shop steward or
of the covenor (chairman) of shop stewards or of
the chairman of the Works' Committee for free-
dom to go into any department of the works to
investigate a grievance. An amusing story was
told me of the way this right was won in one of
the Clyde ship-building works: — The convenor
had begun to exercise the right — and to go
freely from shop to shop as disputes arose —
without the permission of the management. The
manager then ordered him to stop and to stay at
his own machine. The convenor obeyed, but ar-
ranged for a grievance to occur the next morn-
ing in the shop farthest from his own. The
steward from that shop came to him with word
of the grievance. **I can't leave my work." —
*'But it's important." — **How many men in-
volved?"— ''200."—** I don't dare leave my ma-
chine. Tell them to come to me. " And so the 200
men walked the length of the works, gathered
round the convenor's machine while he kept on
with his work, and discussed the dispute. The re-
sult— in the prevailing shortage of labor — was the
concession of the privilege. But the fighting of
the same issue in another works, with Mr. David
Kirkwood as the shop steward in question, led to
the deportation of the Clyde strike leaders in 1916.

140 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

The shop stewards' agreement of December, 1917,
between the engineering employers and certain of
the engineering unions provided that: —

"In connection with this agreement shop stewards
shall be afforded facilities to deal with questions raised
in the shop or portion of a shop in which they are em-
ployed. In course of dealing with these questions they
may, with the previous consent of the management (such
consent not to be unreasonably withheld) , visit any other
shop or portion of a shop in the establishment. In all
other respects shop stewards shall conform to the same
working conditions as their f ellow- workmen. "

The Works Committees report of the Ministry
of Labor states that, "from the experience of
several works ... it would appear that this free-
dom of movement is found to be an essential con-
dition of the success of a committee." The vari-
ous elaborate methods of procedure for the
presentation of grievances by trade union
officials or shop stewards, whether embodied in
long-standing collective agreements or in recent
constitutions of works committees (as well as the
various provisions for securing for the aggrieved
individual the *' principle of the open door" to
the higher management) are beside the present
point. The interesting thing for our purpose is
that they involve a recognition that grievances of
this sort are within the field of action of the

THE STANDARD OF FOREMANSHIP 141

workers' representatives. An editorial in The
Post (the journal of the Postmen's Federation)
of March 8, 1918, emphasized as one of the chief
functions of the shop steward his duties in *'a
case of petty spite or constant bullying from an
overseer or a foreman. " ' ^ It would appear, ' ' says
the Works Co^nmittees report, *Hhat a Works
Committee, if it is to be of any value in ventilat-
ing and removing grievances, must be in a position
to ventilate grievances arising from the conduct of
foremen and overlookers. Such grievances touch
the worker most closely in his daily work." The
case already referred to at Reuben Gaunt 's, Ltd.,
in which a foreman charged with bullying was
tried by a joint body representing the manage-
ment and the workers, is a definite embodiment of
this principle.

These are still only partial indications of the
importance of grievances against foremen in trade
union activity. The union may try to secure the
discharge of an arbitrary foreman ; the union may
secure consideration of its grievances against him
by peaceful means. But frequently the resent-
ment merely smolders and breaks out on other
issues. This feeling, whether or not it appears
on the face of the workers' demands, is un-
doubtedly, as the secretary of an employers' as-
sociation told me, "at the bottom of some of the
bitterest strikes." A correspondent writing to

142 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

the Times during the railway dispute of 1907
declared that: —

"The whole cause of these continued disturbances
is due to the authority and petty tyranny exercised by
the foremen, who are nothing less than despots and
slave-drivers. * '

And the Commission on Industrial Unrest in
1917, in analyzing the unrest in South Wales,
said:—

1

"We must also recognize the fact that the Welsh
collier, even though possibly addicted to bluntness of
speech in conversation with his fellow-workmen is quick
to resent any ebullition of temper or violence of language
towards himself on the part of those placed in authority
over him. . . . Much avoidable friction is due to lack of
self-control in language and temper and want of tact
generally on the part of officials, though circumstances
may often be such as to test them severely in this
respect. ' *

The control exercised by trade unions over the
actions of foremen is a real and continuous thing,
though it gains public notice only when it is fought
for in a strike. It is not of course argued that
this control is wholly different from the modicum
of control exercised by any body of men under
supervision, whether organized or unorganized.
The manager who sees that a certain foreman

THE STANDARD OF FOREMANSHIP 143

fails to get the best work out of his men because
he is unpopular and so replaces him is to that
extent "controlled" by the dislikes of the workers.
Moreover, any group of men, no matter how help-
lessly situated, enforces, if only by nagging and
sulkiness, some sort of standard of treatment from
its overseers — a standard which I was made to
feel very definitely in a few days' service as a
prison guard. The most accurate literary ex-
pression of this group-standard, in The Code by
Robert Frost, is written of the completely unor-
ganized ** hired men" of the New England
farms : —

"The hand that knows his business won't be told
To do work faster or better-;-these two things."

But from the individual hired man, working
alongside the small farmer in the hurry to get in
the hay before a rain and defending his **code"
by simply thrusting his pitchfork into the ground
and marching himself off the field, it is a long
way to the action of the whole body of workers
in a great engineering establishment or in a group
of coal pits scattered up and down a Welsh val-
ley, no individual of whom is of any particular
importance to the employer, nevertheless enforc-
ing by their collective power a certain level of
personal treatment when one foreman has vio-
lated the code in respect to one worker. No one

144 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

claims that trade unionism is mere knight erran-
try, that a high recklessness over obscure and
delicate points of honor leads to lack of caution
in regard to trade union funds or the interests of
trade union members. Even the authors of the
Miners' Next Step, for all their insistence on fight-
ing individual grievances that involve principles,
recommend as a point of tactics that : —

"Whenever it is contemplated bringing any body of
men out on strike, demands must be put forward to
improve the status of each section so brought out."

But the extent to which decent foremanship may
be felt to be a matter of union and inter-union con-
cern is suggested by the description, in the annual
report of the Furnishing Trades Association for
1917, of joint action by the metal and woodwork-
ing trades in an aircraft factory: —

"A mass-meeting of all sections made it quite clear
that they were determined to insist that any attempt to
treat any group of men without regard to their feelings
or self-respect would be treated as a challenge to all the
unions, and as such would be taken up and replied to by
a general stoppage of work. They demand the right to
work under a manager who will treat them as men inside
the shop."

A standard of foremanship, or at least a stand-
ard of manners in foremen, enforced in the more

THE STANDARD OF FOREMANSHIP 145

spectacular cases by striking for the foreman's
dismissal but also by other methods of steady
pressure, is as real — though less definite and pos-
sibly less universal — a subject of trade union regu-
lation as the standard of wages itself.

XI
SPECIAL MANAGERIAL FUNCTIONS

The last three sections dealt with the relation of
labor to its supervisors. This section deals with
the relation of labor to certain special functions
of supervision, usually thought of as the business
of foremen or managers but sometimes exercised
by the workers.

The first of these is the enforcement of minor
discipline. There is, as the Ministry of Labor
reports, **a considerable body of experience" of
the exercise of disciplinary functions by works
committees. The experience to which that report
refers falls, however, entirely into two classes, —
oases of administering bonus schemes under
which deductions are made for various offences,
and cases of enforcing special war-time discip-
line under the power or the threat of the Muni-
tions of War Act. In a typical instance of the first,
a joint committee meets monthly to assess the
fines incurred for the following offences : —

"a. Insubordination, or use of improper language.
b. Undue carelessness and wilful damage,
e. Neglect to enter goods, advices, time cards,
dockets or time sheets."

146

SPECIAL MANAGERIAL FUNCTIONS 147

The war emergency cases are more interesting.
The Munitions of War Act of 1915 and the regula-
tions issued under its authority by the Ministry
of Munitions put discipline in the *' controlled
establishments " ^ on a basis totally different from
peace conditions. Violations of a firm's posted
rules were subject to prosecution in special courts,
the munitions tribunals, in which a chairman ap-
pointed by the Ministry acted as judge with an
equal number of assessors representing the em-
ployers and the trade unions. This method was
in many cases felt by both parties to be a nuisance,
and various experiments in joint discipline were
tried. The Whitehead Torpedo Works, in sug-
gesting a joint scheme to its employees, said: —

"There is a class of rules, offences against which are
punishable by a fine of half a crown dismissal, or a
prosecution under the Munitions Act. None of these
penalties is a convenient one. Fines are as much dis-
liked by the firm as by the men ; dismissal entails the loss
of services which may be badly needed; and prosecu-
tions entail great waste of time and may produce
more evils than the original ones they are meant to
cure. ' '

* " If the Minister of Munitions considers it expedient for the

fmrpose of the successful prosecution of the war that any estab-
ishment in which munition work is carried on should be subject
to the special provisions as to limitation of employers' profits
and control of persons employed and other matters contained in
this section, he may make an order declaring that establishment
to be a controlled establishment." Munitions of War Act,
1915, Part II, Section 4.

148 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Some committees were reluctant to take on
themselves the responsibility and unpopularity of
punishing their fellows; those that accepted it
probably did so with the feeling that the special
war powers of the employer made punishment
inevitable and that this was a way of making it
reasonable. In one remarkable case a Works
Tribunal — not a joint committee but a chairman
and a jury of twelve elected wholly by the work-
ers— exercised authority over these matters and
is said to have brought about great improvement
in discipline and timekeeping.

"Bad timekeeping," by the way — i.e. irregular
attendance at work — wa's the most important of-
fence which came under this sort of discipline.
Special joint committees to deal with this prob-
lem were set up at the suggestion of the Ministry
of Munitions in the ironworks of Cleveland and
Durham. The duties and powers of the local
committees were defined as follows in the Cleve-
land rules: —

" (a) To inquire fully into every ease brought by the
Manager of the Works of alleged bad timekeeping on
the part of any workman employed at the works under
his charge.

(b) To give warning and advice to any workman who
may appear to need it.

(c) To inflict subject to the provisions of the Truck
Acts, such penalty or fine as in the judgment of the Com-

SPECIAL MANAGERIAL FUNCTIONS 149

mittee the case shall merit, such fine not to exceed
twenty shillings in any one instance.

(d) In the case of repeated offences, to transmit
the facts and evidence to the judgment of the Cen-
tral.

(e) In the event of the Works Committee being
equally divided on any case [wliich, it may be added, is
said to have happened very rarely] the same shall be
submitted to the Central Committee for decision.

(f) Each Works Committee shall have power to re-
duce or remit altogether any fine imposed by the Com-
mittee, if the offender's conduct during the four weeks
succeeding the hearing of his case justifies any variation
in the original penalty."

All these cases were under the direct power of
the Munitions of War Act, and accepted only for
its duration. The only further extension of this
principle was in the Absentee Committees of the
Miners, which in their development as Output
Committees were one of the most interesting by-
products of the war and will be discussed in a
later chapter. Much the same argument, however,
was used while the Miners were discussing the
question of assuming responsibility for the at-
tendance of their members. **If we don't accept
it, we may be put under the Act. Then there'll
be punishment anyway; we had better see that
it's done justly." The ** appeal to all mine
workers" for good timekeeping, issued as a plac-
ard by the Yorkshire Miners, read in part: —

150 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

"Fellow Workers: This appeal is made to prevent
more drastic measures being brought to bear upon our
great industry by the Government."

"It is a line of punishment by your own men,"
said one of the Miners' leaders, ''and if the men
have no confidence in their own men who have
been selected from their own branch, whom can
they have confidence in?"

A second of these special managerial functions
is that of providing for the safety of the workers.
Here it is naturally the Miners that have needed
and secured the greatest extent of control. The
Mines Acts of 1911 and earlier give the workers
power to appoint an inspector of their own to
make a complete examination of the machinery
and workings as often as once a month and also
to make examination, in company with a legal ad-
viser or with a mining or electrical engineer, after
an accident. How much this privilege means in
practice is hard to estimate, and probably varies
greatly from district to district. A correspon-
dent writing to the Colliery Engmeman claims
that it means very little in Cumberland : —

"The Act which enables mine- workers to appoint a
person to periodically inspect every part of the mine,
ventilating apparatus, machinery, etc., has been allowed
to remain a dead letter at most of the collieries in this

SPECIAL MANAGERIAL FUNCTIONS 151

coalfield. One of the chief reasons for this has been
that if the persons elected as local inspectors give an
adverse report, the management would soon find some
means of getting rid of them. ... It is not uncommon
to be told by mine-workers that their mine has not been
examined by local inspectors for 10 years. During the
inquiry into the Senyhenyd explosion, 1911, in which
439 men and boys lost their lives it came out in evi-
dence that the miners had not inspected the mine for
18 months. The reason the men gave was that no man
dared to give a true report."

On the other hand a South Wales leader declared
that : —

"In many parts of the South Wales coalfield, the
workmen themselves have appointed practical exam-
iners, and these men are doing very excellent work, in
my opinion, preventing accidents."

but advocated that these examiners be empowered
to prosecute the owners for violations. Even as
the law stands, however, it implies a definite
statutory recognition of the right of the workers
to take an active and independent part in the
prevention of accident.

The Miners' Federation also claims responsi-
bility for the clauses in the Mines Act which set
the qualifications of the firemen, examiners, and
deputies — the officials directly entrusted with
safety functions. Here again the miners claim
that these men have not dared to report faithfully

152 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

the conditions for fear of the employers. At their
1917 Conference, the Miners' Federation passed
the following resolution in order, as they claimed,
to secure for the men in these positions a combi-
nation of the fearlessness of the government in-
spector and the knowledge of the practical
miner:—

"That it would be conducive to the best interests of
the miners that firemen, examiners, and deputies should
be appointed by the workmen and paid by the State."

The report of the Commission on Industrial Un-
rest in South Wales (1917) recommended that
the appointment and dismissal of those officials
should be entrusted to joint committees. Certain
of the Deputies' Associations favored the oppo-
site— state control and appointment — in order to
secure freedom from pressure from either side.
The Miners have also exerted a considerable
negative control over safety arrangements by re-
fusing to work under conditions they thought
dangerous. There are a number of references to
these "safety strikes" scattered through the evi-
dence before the Coal Commission. One of the
more specific occurs in the testimony of Mr. Win-
stone of the South Wales Miners' Federation: —

**Q. Was there a stoppage in Monmouthshire re-
cently ?
A. Yes.

SPECIAL MANAGERIAL FUNCTIONS 153

Q. Do you mind telling us the nature of the stoppage!

A. The stoppage took place at the Risca Colliery in.
Monmouthshire where 15,000 men were idle for several
days owing to a danger arising from gas, a shortage
of timber, and the dukie rope cutting into the timber
and cutting through the rails.

Q. That is what we could call a safety strike?

A. Yes. Then at the Bedwas Mine the men are out
today because of a safety stoppage. The owners de-
clined to stall the place, and the men were fearing that
a crush would take place, and so they stopped."

These disputes are not only interesting as in-
dicating a degree of present control but as often
furnishing the background for further demands
for control. A miner who had been discharged
from a Scotch colliery for refusing to work in a
place which he considered dangerous explained
his case in great detail and with diagrams in a
leaflet addressed to his fellow-workers at the
colliery and reprinted in The Worker (Glasgow)
of September 27, 1919. The moral which he drew
was this : —

"If I lost, it's you who have lost, for you will have
lost the right to decide yourselves about the safety
of your own place. My idea is that we should demand
that chocks — hard wood chocks — should be put in every
loosened place and kept up with the face. That as soon
as possible we should appoint pit committees to con-
trol the method of working; this would guarantee more
safety to the coal getter."

154 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

The same feeling was expressed as a part of
the official policy of the Miners' Federation by
Mr. Robert Smillie in the course of a deputation
to the Prime Minister, on October 9, 1919, to de-
mand nationalization and joint control: —

* * The miners put forward their claim primarily on the
question of safety."

The Miners, then, have considerable power, both
legal and actual, over the safety of the mines and
are pressing vigorously for further control. There
is in the other industries no case of workers* con-
trol over safety to compare with this. It is true
that in many industries there are Factory Act reg-
ulations— often secured in part by trade union agi-
tation— and even occasional provisions for inspec-
tors appointed by workpeople ; but in practice they
apparently involve little or no trade union action.
There is, however, at least one interesting case of
the beginnings of joint control. A joint sub-
committee of the Builders ' Parliament in conjunc-
tion with representatives from the Whitley Coun-
cils in the other wood-working industries and in
consultation with the manufacturers of wood-
working machines, has made a study of the dan-
gers arising from the use of wood-working ma-
chinery. Its report of August 14, 1919, contains
a series of detailed suggestions intended as a basis
for further regulations under the Factory Acts.

SPECIAL MANAGERIAL FUNCTIONS 155

A third and less important special function of
supervision occasionally exercised by the workers
is that of the allocation of work, i.e. the distribu-
tion within a given group of workers of the par-
ticular jobs or working places. The question is of
some importance in many piece-work trades, and
there is much complaint among the miners and
others that favoritism in assigning working-places
and jobs is used as a covert method of victimiza-
tion. There are very few cases, however, in which
complaint has gone over into control. Lord Gain-
ford, the chief representative of the coal-owners,
told the Coal Commission of the system in effect
in the Durham coalfield : —

"In our county at the end of every quarter the men
ballot amongst themselves for the different positions
in the mines. The men as a rule are allowed to select
their own working mates, and they go into the place
which has been selected by ballot."

The printers furnish the best example of control
under this head; a ''companionship" (team) of
compositors on piece work has the right to appoint
its own ''clicker" who distributes the work so as
to divide equitably "the fat" {i.e. work on which
good money can be made) . It is probable that in
many trades there are occasional instances of in-
formal control of this sort, as, for example, at a
certain "pot-bank" in which the equalization of

156 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

work between one team (of jiggerer, turner, and
handler) and another is arranged by the men. A
writer in the Railway Review suggests that ** allo-
cations of turns of duty" are a field for joint or
workers' control to replace what he calls the "in-
competency and want of foresight and arrange-
ment on the part of petty ofl&cials, ' ' and suggests
that '*at each depot ... a representative of the
men might be periodically chosen to regulate these
turns of duty. " The issue is even more important
in the case of the street railways, where the real
irksomeness of the working day depends not so
much on the number of hours actually worked as
on the ** spread-over time" between the beginning
of the first run and the end of the last. The mat-
ter depends almost solely upon the care spent
in arranging the working schedules, and the tram-
waymen in Leeds and other parts of Yorkshire
have recently won a substantial concession in
securing the right to be consulted in any change
of these schedules — a right which at the time of
the last change amounted in substance to the actual
working-out of the schedules by the union ofiicials
and a large increase in the percentage of con-
tinuous runs.

The fourth of these special functions of manage-
ment is that of the measurement of results.
There are instances of a degree of control by

SPECIAL MANAGERIAL FUNCTIONS 157

workers over the two matters of measurement of
quantity (where the pay is based on the amount
of output of the individual or the works), and
measurement of quality (where deductions are
made from the pay for spoiled work). The best
known and longest established case under the first
head is that of the miners ' checkweighman. By a
law of 1887 (which strengthened a law of 1860)
a majority of miners in each pit may appoint a
representative to watch the weighing of the coal
at the pit's mouth and to keep an accurate check
on the recording of each man's work, and the
checkweighman 's pay is deducted from the wages
of all the coal-getters who are paid by weight.
A strike of 120O men in 1913 ''against raising and
tipping coal after the fixed hour and in absence
of checkweighman," is an indication that this
right is felt to be an important one ; the incidental
result of the arrangement, in providing a means
of support for Miners' Federation officials, has
been exultantly pointed out by the Webbs and
others. A bill extending this practice to certain
other industries, — iron and steel works, the docks,
limestone and chalk quarries, etc. — ^was intro-
duced by the Labor Party and passed by the pres-
ent Parliament. This is a case of the right to
safeguard the earnings of the individual piece
worker. A slightly different situation is that in
which the payment depends, not on the output of

158 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

the individual, but on that of the works. In the
Durham coke-ovens the pay is based on the aver-
age weight of coke produced by the ovens. The
agreement in regard to the "Ascertainment of
Yield" is as follows: —

"That for the purpose of correctly ascertaining the
average weight of coke produced per oven at any
yard either party may require that the coke be
weighed . . . the men to have the liberty to send a
man to inspect and take a copy of the weighings of
coke as recorded in the weighman's book."

A check on the judgment of quality is important
in a few of the smaller trades, in which deductions
are made for spoiled and bad work, though it is
obviously a more difficult matter for joint or trade
union action than a simple weighing of tons of
coal. In pottery the custom of paying only for
ware that comes "good from oven" and the lack
of any joint means of assessing the fault in cases
of breakage is at present a subject of dispute. In
nut and bolt making, there is the rough and ready
check of putting all rejected work on the scrap
heap in the presence of its maker. The value is
assessed and agreed upon and deducted from the
maker's earnings; the waste is then his property.
The elaborate regulations of the Yorkshire Glass
Bottle Makers for determining the responsibility
for bad work are worth quoting, if only as in-
dicating the old-fashioned nature of the trade: —

SPECIAL MANAGERIAL FUNCTIONS 159

"That bottles picked out [rejected] be not broken
down until the men have had an opportunity of inspect-
ing them In all cases of bad or faulty metal the

men shall immediately send for the manager to take
the responsibility. . . . Any workman commencing to
work knowing the metal to be bad, without skimming it
according to the established custom of the trade, or fail-
ing to carry out the conditions herein specified, shall
not be entitled to payment for the bottles put out."

The Nottingham lace weavers put the deter-
mination of the fault entirely in the hands of the
shop committee: —

"No stoppage [deduction] shall be made for places
caused by the fault of the machine. . . . Where neglect
of the workman causes extra mending, places across or
spoiled work, and where a workman fails to carry out
written instructions in a workmanlike manner a claim
for stoppage may be made by the employer, but all
claims must be supplied in writing with particulars to
the shop committee. Unless the shop committee re-
ceive such particulars and consent to the stoppage, no
stoppage shall be made and the employer shall be left
to such other remedy as may be open to him."

The sum of duties exercised by the representa-
tives of the workers under these special manager-
ial functions is considerable. THeir importance in
a study of control is lessened by two facts: — the
most highly-developed cases of the enforcement
of discipline were definitely for the war emergency

160 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

in fear of worse things, and do not at all represent
the responsibilities the greater number of trade
unionists are ready to accept under peace con-
ditions ; the control under the other heads is almost
entirely a mere check on the care or honesty of the
employer and involves little independent direction.
The exercise of the disciplinary function was then
mainly an emergency measure ; the other functions
might be more accurately spoken of as check-
managerial than managerial.

xn

METHODS OF PAYMENT

The last section clearly raises the question of the
methods of payment of wages. The issue of the
amount of wages falls outside our definition; the
issue of the method of payment, however *'im-
mediate to the wage bargain itself, ' ' is too closely
bound up with the methods of control to be com-
pletely passed by. There is certainly no use in
attempting to go over all the ground covered by
Mr. D. F. Schloss's Methods of Industrial Re-
mimeration (1892, 1894 and 1898) or Mr. G. D. H.
Cole's Payment of Wages (1918). The object is
merely to show how the arguments for and against
certain methods of payment are colored by the
struggle for control, and how various methods of
payment have given rise to particular attempts at
workers' control.

The first point is suggested by a comparison of
the two books mentioned. Mr. Schloss declared
that : —

"In regard to the method of industrial remuneration
Trade Unionism does not propose to make any change
whatever in the arrangements now prevailing."

161

162 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

The more recent movements grouped as the
''Demand for Control" make such a statement
no longer possible. Mr. Cole's book is in fact
largely taken up with the arguments for and
against various changes which trades unionists
(if not Trade Unionism) are anxious either to
make or to prevent. It is here worth while merely
to mention a few of the issues to indicate the com-
plexity of motives and their bearing on "control"
as well as on the amount of wages. The various
wood-working trades, for example, have been strik-
ing or agitating for the abandonment of the piece
work and premium bonus systems which had in
some cases been forced upon them during the war.
Here the issue of quality of workmanship — ^which
the workers claim is sacrificed under piece work —
seems to be more real than in most trades, though
it is by no means the only motive. The Carpenters'
and Joiners ' Journal argues : —

"That employers who desire the best class of crafts-
manship put into any kind of joinery work, never re-
quest joiners to adopt premium bonus or piece work sys-
tems, because all men — employers and workmen alike —
recognize that either of the above named systems in-
evitably leads to "rushing" work, therefore necessarily
"scamping" work, and consequently the demoralizing
effect in the long run hinders instead of assisting in
increasing the output of the genuine craftsman's pro-
duction. ' '

METHODS OF PAYMENT 163

In engineering and other industries a guerrilla
warfare is being waged over the introduction and
the conditions of introduction of piece work and
more especially of premium bonus and "efficiency'*
systems. The general argument of the employers
for the introduction of payment by results is that
it is necessary as providing an incentive for
greater production — a way to ''speed up" the
workers. Some of them favor collective payment
by results, that is, payment based on the output
of the whole shop or works, as a way of getting the
workers to ''speed each other up" — which recalls
the old argument for profit sharing that it "makes
every workman an overseer." The motives of the
workers who oppose the system are various — a dis-
taste for being speeded up and the past experience
and fear of rate-cutting are among the chief. A
fairly constant argument against individual piece
work in many industries is that it makes collec-
tive bargaining harder to enforce and that it di-
vides the workers against themselves instead of
making for the "solidarity of labor," — that is,
as the Ironfotmders' Journal puts it, "That it
promotes selfishness in the workshop." On the
other hand I heard a printing employer argue on
just the same ground against a change to piece-
work which his employees wanted — that it would
destroy the good team work among his com-
positors. The Miners' Federation at its 1917 Con-

164 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

ference passed a resolution in favor of the aboli-
tion of piece work; but a vigorous minority in-
sisted that time work would mean much more irk-
some supervision, that ''you would probably want
a doggy or a deputy in every stall to see that the
men are working their hardest." Somewhat the
same point is occasionally put in the statement
that the workers "feel freer" in regard to attend-
ance under piece work. The most conspicuous ad-
vocates of workers' control, including Mr. Frank
Hodges of the Miners and Mr. Gr. D. H. Cole, are
in favor of time work.^ With that opinion, as
it applies to future policy, it is not the affair of
the present study to deal ; from the historical point
of view,^ one fact might be set on the other side,
that the genuine interest of the miners in the
problems of mine-management, as well as the
favorable attitude of the cotton operatives toward
improvements in machinery, are partly traceable
to their piece-work systems. In any case, it is
clear that the quarrels over methods of payment
cannot be completely disentangled from the gen-
eral question of the control of industry.

For the present purpose, however, it is more
useful to examine the specific forms of control
developed or advocated in connection with the
methods of payment now in force. Most of the

* The qualifications which Cole would attach to this opinion
are stated on pp. Ill and 112 of The Payment of Wages.

METHODS OF PAYMENT 166

labor arguments for time work are negative, that
is, arguments that piece work is more dangerous
to the standard rate; therefore it is no surprise
to find fewer special forms of control under pay-
ment by time. The only case I know of, in fact,
of the exercise by workers of unusual functions
of direction under any sort of time system, is that
of the ''grading system" of the Birmingham brass
trades. There the executive of the National Union
of Brass Workers grades each worker according
to his ability and places him in one of seven differ-
ent classes, for each of which a minimum wage is
set by collective bargaining. If an employer chal-
lenges the qualifications of any man, a practical
examination in the processes of the trade is given
him by the managers of the Municipal Brass
Trades School.

Piece work and the more complicated systems
of payment by results naturally show more in-
stances of union activity, if not a greater degree
of control, over the methods of payment. The
difference of course lies, not in the bargaining
for the general standard of wages, but in the ap-
plication of the standard rate to the setting of par-
ticular piece rates (or, under bonus systems, basic
times) for particular jobs or processes. The pro-
cedure varies much more widely than can be in-
dicated here, but may be thought of as falling into
two broad classes, — that in which ''lists'* or agree-

166 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

ments reached by formal collective bargaining
cover every process in the trade, and that in which
the setting of the particular price is more or less
entirely a matter between the employer and the
individual workman or immediate groups of work-
men concerned. The outstanding example of the
first class is the cotton industry, where the ex-
pert secretaries of the two associations, with no
motive for setting a new price in a single mill
either above or below the general standard of
Lancashire and with a strong professional pride in
the correctness of their mathematics, have little
diflficulty in applying the elaborate agreed lists to
any variation of speed, pattern, or process. Their
greatest difficulty (aside of course from the gen-
eral level of wages), has been the ''bad spinning"
question, i.e. disputes arising from the claims of
workers that the cotton supplied them was of such
bad quality that they could not make the standard
rate at list prices. The Brooklands Agreement,
which was the chief treaty governing the industry,
broke down in 1912 over just this point, the em-
ployers being willing to admit that grievances
under this head should be promptly discussed, but
refusing to accept a formal agreed test. The same
issue occasionally occurs in other industries; in
a branch of the woolen trades, it is settled by the
following arrangements : —

METHODS OF PAYMENT 167

"Should any dispute arise as to the quality of the
wool, a sample shall be submitted to the Bradford Con-
ditioning House by a representative of the workmen.
Each body to abide by the decision of the certificate, and
the expenses of the test to be paid by the party found to
be in error."

A somewhat parallel difficulty is encountered in
coal-mining in settling rates for ''abnormal
places" — working places that are for one reason
or another so difficult that a standard wage can-
not be earned without special allowance. The
Miners' Minimum Wage Act of 1912 was in part
intended to meet this problem by assuring each
man a wage irrespective of his place; but, since
the minimum rates are in all cases well below the
normal earnings in a good place, the question still
often leads to serious disputes. These are usually
fought out between the miners' agents and the
employer and involve no special forms of control.
One South Wales colliery, however, works on the
agreement that: —

"When any variation in the conditions of any work-
ing place or places occurs, the person or persons work-
ing in such places shall have the right to call in the aid
of any two members of the Workmen's Committee, to-
gether with two Officers of the Company, in order to
agree upon any additional rate or allowance for work-
ing such place or places. ' *

168 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

The Commission on Industrial Unrest in its re-
port on South Wales recommended, as a subject
for discussion in a possible Joint Industrial
Council, ''the right of the men with the employers
to select an equal number of the workers engaged
in carrying out tests in new seams before price
lists are arranged."

Bate-fixing in the other class of industries,
those not covered by lists, may mean anything
from purely ''take-it-or-leave-it" determination
(whether arbitrary or ''scientific") by the em-
ployer or a strictly individual bargain to fairly
complete though informal collective bargaining.
Engineering is the storm center among this second
class of industries and shows the widest variations.
The principle which is supposed to govern it is
that of "mutuality": —

"The prices to be paid shall be fixed by irmtual ar-
rangement between the employer and workman or work-
men who perform the work. ' '

This means at least a bargain; the worker has
the right — which may or may not mean the op-
portunity—to say no; as it stands, it may mean
no more than individual bargaining. Doubtless,
however, there are always the rudiments of a col-
lective bargain. One man's acceptance of a bad
bargain is obviously the other men's loss, and the

METHODS OF PAYMENT . 169

men doubtless talk over their rates. From this
informal understanding there are various stages
to full collective bargaining. Certain unions make
regulations that their men shall not accept rates
below those set ''by a majority of members work-
ing in the shops." This pricing by shopmates
leads naturally to the election of a shop steward
or a shop committee to take over the pricing func-
tion, a step of great importance as the origin of
many of the most active shop committees. This
may mean within the shops almost as complete a
standardization as in the price-list industries, par-
ticularly if the steward or the committee keeps a
''book of prices" with which to compare any new
prices offered.

The situation is somewhat different in those
piece-work and premium bonus systems in which
the management employs a special scientific rate-
fixer or where the time a job should take is deter-
mined in a special time-study office, though a sim-
ilar range of variations in procedure occurs here.
The whole method may be considered merely the
firm's business, or the firm may be willing to dis-
cuss with a committee the methods by which prices
are fixed but not the prices fixed in individual
cases. On the other hand it is quite possible for
scientific price fixing to co-exist with a consider-
able extent of joint control. On just this point it
is worth while to quote at length from the scheme

170 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

and experience of the Phoenix Dynamo Company
of Bradford : —

"One of the greatest objections to present piece-work
systems is that the employer works out the price in
secret, writes down the time on a card, and this settles
the price. Now, the men feel that payment by results
is a bargain and that it is not within the province of
the employer to state arbitrarily what the price is to
be. . . .

On getting out a new job we would calculate the feeds
and speeds which were suitable for the tool on which the
job was to be performed, and then put forward the time
we offer ; you are not bound to accept it and can appeal
if you like. In this event you go to the Time Study
Office, where the man who has dealt with the job will go
through the detail of his calculations, and if he has
made a slip will at once put it right.

Our time fixing is not infallible, and the men can
help us by pointing out errors. If, however, we are
unconvinced that the price is unreasonable, and the man
is equally unconvinced that it is reasonable, he can
then say, *I want this job to go to Committee'. . . .

The Committee consists of 3 of the firm's representa-
tives and 3 workmen's representatives consisting of the
man concerned and 2 workmen selected by him who are
operating the same type of machine or whose work is
closely allied to the work in question. ... In the event
of the Committee failing to agree it is then up to the
firm to demonstrate in their own works that the time
is fair and that time and a quarter [over the guaran-
teed time rate] can be made on it. . . .

The surprising part of the scheme over the period

METHODS OF PAYMENT 171

in which it has now been operating is the very small
number of Committees which are held. It would appear
that a very stupid workman who goes to the Time Study
Office to argue with the rate-fixer, or a very thick-headed
rate-fixer, are either of them rather afraid of what a
Committee would decide about their particular case, and
so whichever party feels himself to be technically weak-
est in the argument appears to give way. ' '

A similar arrangement applies by agreement
in the engineering trade at Barrow. This is prob-
ably the furthest extent of joint control possible
where the specialized skill is still entirely the prop-
erty of one side. The Works Committee's pam-
phlet already quoted reports the suggestion from
a firm's rate-fixer that a desirable next step would
be the appointment by the men of a separate rate-
fixer of their own — an idea already in opera-
tion at a Bristol engineering works in which the
firm pays a rate-fixer who is chosen by the
men.

All these are cases of individual payment by
results. But collective payment by results — where
the payment is based on the production of a group
or team of workers, or on that of the shop or
entire factory — has also its direct and important
bearings on the problem of control. The connec-
tion between collective piece work and control in
the smaller crafts has already been mentioned.
Perhaps it is worth while to quote again the rep-

172 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

resentative of the Stuff Pressers to illustrate the
type:—

"This principle of collective payment throws the re-
sponsibility upon every individual to contribute his
maximum quota to the whole. It has almost completely
crushed out of existence the practice of *ca-canny,' for
where is the man of sufficient courage to exercise his
genius for shirking when the consequences of his action
would be to bring down on his head the wrath of the
shop?"

At the present time workers in engineering and
other industries show a much greater readiness to
accept collective piece work or a collective (shop
or works) bonus on output than the individual
systems. Nor can the reason be put quite as sim-
ply as by the director of a steel works who told
me that the reason for this preference was that
**it didn't show up the rotters as quickly." An-
other side is put in the resolution in favor of col-
lective piece work passed by the Weymouth Joint
Committee of Allied Engineering Trades on the
ground that, "it restores the old collective spirit,
securing collective effort, collective interest and
harmony, that it produces evenness of earnings in
place of inequality. ' ' An elaborately safeguarded
system of collective piece work is that put into
force by the Bradford Dyers ' Association in 1913,
which contained the following clauses : —

METHODS OF PAYMENT 173

"The Association may at any branch introduce pay-
ment by piece-work rates. All piece work slmll he based
on collective work and collective payment. . . .

The fixing of rates and the arrangements of sets
shall be mutually agreed upon in writing by representa-
tives of the Associations and the Unions. Such rates
shall be so fixed as to enable a full rated man to earn
not less than 7d. per hour. . . .

No rate or set shall he altered witJiout the consent
in writing of the Association and the Union or Unions
to which the employees {iffected belong.

Trials of three calendar months' duration shall pre-
cede the final settlement of rates."

Under this system the "sets" of workers are
said to have taken an increased part in arranging
their own work, a development towards control
which had been actively in the mind of at least
one of the Dyers' leaders who had advocated the
scheme.

The cases already quoted perhaps cover most
of the range of methods of payment which carry
with them degrees of workers' control important
in the present industrial system. It is worth
while, however, to contrast two other systems,
which imply much greater control by the workers,
co-operative work and collective contract. The
former was quoted by D. F. Schloss as an archaic
dying system on the very edges of modern indus-
try; the latter has been advocated by two Clyde
shop stewards as a revolutionary idea for the

174 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

great industry itself. ''The distinctive features
of Co-operative Work . . . are that (1) the mem-
bers of the co-operative group are associated by
their own free choice, determining for themselves
of how many persons and of what persons that
group shall consist, (2) the associated workmen
select from amongst themselves their own leader,
and (3) arrange the division of the collective
wages between the members of the group in such
manner as may be mutually agreed upon between
these associates as being' equitable. " ^ Messrs.
Gallacher and Paton argue ' that * ' the next step ' '
for a shop stewards' committee, after some ex-
perience as the ' * sole medium of contact between
the firm and the workers" should be to ''under-
take in one large contract, or in two or three con-
tracts at most, the entire business of production
throughout the establishment. Granted an alli-
ance with the organized office-workers — a develop-
ment which is assured so soon as the Shop Com-
mittees are worthy of confidence and influential
enough to give adequate protection — these con-
tracts might include the work of design and pur-
chase of raw material, as well as the operations
of manufacture and construction. But to begin
with, the undertaking will cover only the manual
operations. The contract price, or wages — for

' D. F. Schloss, op. cit., 1918 edition, p. 155.

* Towards Induttrial Democracy. See Note on Sources.

METHODS OF PAYMENT 175

it is still wages — will be remitted by the firm to
the Works Committee in a lump sum, and dis-
tributed to the workers by their own representa-
tives, or their officials, and by whatever system or
scale of remuneration they choose to adopt. . . .
A specially enlightened union of this sort would,
no doubt, elect to pool the earnings of its members
and pay to each a regular salary weekly, monthly,
or quarterly, exacting, of course, from the re-
cipient a fixed minimum record of work for the
period. . . . The functions of management will
have passed to the Committees, and it will be their
business to see that contract prices amply cover
all the costs of these functions."

It is obvious, then, that the various methods of
wage payment raise issues far beyond the im-
mediate bargaining for wages. Methods of pay-
ment themselves depend largely on the technique
of the industry concerned, but each system of
payment has in turn its by-products in particular
forms of attempts at control, and one of the most
detailed projects put forward by the propagan-
dists for workers ' control is based on a proposed
change in the method of payment. But it is high
time to discuss the questions raised in the last
few sections, not only with reference to the re-
lations of man to man in industry, but also more
specifically to the relations of man to the tech-
nique of production.

XIII

TECHNIQUE: RESTRICTION AND
RESTRICTIONS

The people who write about the things the workers
do and do not control, often use the broad dis-
tinction between conditions of employment on the
one hand and methods of production on the other.
Sometimes they say that the former are rightly
the worker's affair, the latter entirely the em-
ployer's. The moral of it is not this book's busi-
ness, but the distinction is a help in classifying.
The forms of control already studied fall under
the first head; those still to be discussed belong
to the second. But the division is by no means
rigid — the facts do not divide so neatly; no one
of the earlier sections has failed to raise questions
of the technique of production. Nor does it rep-
resent a sharply logical demarcation ; the process
at which a man works is perhaps the most im-
portant condition of his employment. But clearly
in turning to technique, we are coming to a vital
part of our subject. We have discussed some of
the personal relationships in industry — the politics
of industry; but how about the work itself I What

17a

RESTRICTION AND RESTRICTIONS 177

control have the organized workers exercised over
the actual technology of mdustryf

The newspaper reader is likely to think of
workers' control over production, if at all, as
either sheer restriction of output, or else as a
series of restrictions which prevent the use and
(where the issue really comes to a head) the in-
troduction of the best industrial technique. This
section, then, will deal with restriction and re-
strictions.

Restriction of output — apparently better known
as ''this damned restriction of output" — is an
interesting subject, if only for the passion it
arouses. But it is necessary to examine it very
closely to see whether it falls within the range
of our inquiry. To decide how much is to be pro-
duced— the employer 's decision whether it is more
profitable to increase or restrict his output of a
certain commodity — is obviously a main element
in the control of industry. But it is not
claimed that the workers in restricting output
(except in one or two rare instances which will
be mentioned under ''Trade Policy") have made
any conscious attempt to sh^re in that decision.
The charge is that the workers — or rather some
groups of workers — have been deliberately setting
a limit to their own output; deciding for them-
selves "what amount of output by each operative
should be considered a fair day's work, not to be

178 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

considerably exceeded under penalty of the serious
displeasure of the workshop. ' ' There is no doubt
at all that a ca'canny (go slow) policy is a serious
problem in many industries — rand a ca'canny that
cannot bo explained as a mere natural difference
between the employer's and the worker's idea of
a ''fair day's work." Very likely the extent of
this policy is exaggerated in certain current ex-
hortations to hard work, but its existence is ad-
mitted by too many trade union leaders ^ to be a
matter of doubt. Besides sheer laziness two mo-
tives are usually suggested for the restriction of
output. There is first the fear of the rate-cutting
that has in the past so often followed increases in
output. ''Slow down," says Lola Ridge's heroine
in The Ghetto, "You'll have him cutting us
again!" The second is the notion that somehow
the less work is done the more there will be to
go around. This is the meaning of a catch
phrase from the Ragged Trousered Philanthro-
pists:—

"Just because we've been working a dam sight too
hard, now we've got no work to do."

The use of ca'canny or the "stay-in strike" as
a conscious form of militant labor policy — either
as a weapon in a particular dispute or with the

' Some of them even use it as a text for denouncing the pres-
ent industrial system.

RESTRICTION AND RESTRICTIONS 179

fixed idea of making capitalism impossible by mak-
ing it unprofitable — is another matter and surely
of much rarer occurrence. Its classic expression
is in The Mmers' Next Step published in 1911 by
a group of Welsh miners : —

"Lodges should, as far as possible, discard the old
method of coming out on strike for any little minor
grievance. And adopt the more scientific weapon of the
irritation strike by simply remaining at work reducing
their output, and so contrive by their general conduct,
to make the colliery unremunerative. . . .

Use of the irritation strike

If the men wish to bring effective pressure to bear,
they must use methods which tend to reduce profits.
One way of doing this is to decrease production, while
continuing at work. Quite a number of instances where
this method has been successfully adopted in South Wales
could be adduced," -

But the very fact that th^ writers felt it neces-
sary to explain at such length, even for South
Wales readers, what an irritation strike was, is
sufficient indication of its rarity. As a means of
winning control, it is advocated by only a tiny
minority. From the point of view of this inquiry,
the subject may be ruled out of the question.
Restricting output as a method of piece-work bar-
gaining introduces no particularly new principle
into the wage bargain. Shirking is not controlling

180 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

industry thougli, like striking, it may be a means
towards it. And the ** stay-in strike" is no more,
and no less, a means of controlling industry than
the ordinary strike and therefore needs no separate
treatment here. Restriction of output is more a
method of warfare than a form of control and,
since this is neither a discussion of the ways of
winning control nor of the technique of industrial
strife, it is fortunately unnecessary to make any
further guesses about the amount of restriction.

But if mere restriction of output — for all its
interest as an industrial problem and an industrial
symptom — ^has no great bearing on the subject,
certain specific restrictions are very closely re-
lated to control. The Munitions of War Act of
1915 provided (II.4.[3]) that:—

**Any rule, practice, or custom not having the force
of law which tends to restrict production or employment
shall be suspended" ... in the controlled establish-
ments.

The Government's pledge was given to the trade
unions in the famous Treasury Agreement (see
next section) that these regulations would be re-
stored after the war; the same pledge was a part
of the Government's contract with the employers;
the employers were under obligation to keep a
record of all such changes in practice; and the
Restoration (of Pre- War Practices) Act has just

RESTRICTION AND RESTRICTIONS 181

made the pledge enforceable at law. Evidently,
then, there was an extensive body of custom and
vested right in regulations that could at least be
held to ''restrict production or employment" and
which were considered by the unions, and recog-
nized by the Government, as of first-rate im-
portance.

It is then important to try to estimate how far
this mass of confusing, usually local, and often
unwritten custom, involved a real — though nega-
tive and restrictive — control over the technique of
industry. Certain restrictions that were held to
fall within the meaning of this clause may be ruled
out at once from the present subject, or have been
discussed in earlier sections. Limitations on the
amount of overtime, for example, were given up
for the war emergency; the question is an impor-
tant one but surely not primarily one of technique,
and its most direct bearing on control has already
been discussed under ' ' Unemployment. ' ' Regula-
tions forbidding piece work and premium bonus
systems were held to come under the Act ; they of
course affect industrial technique only indirectly,
and were sufficiently covered in the last section.

A more important set of these restrictions has
to do with the subjects of the ''Right to a Trade"
— apprenticeship, demarcation, and the opposition
to dilution and the employment of women — re-
ferred to in the fifth emotion. These are certainly,

182 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

when enforced, a / direct interference with the
** manipulation of the workman by the employer;"
they involve saying which machines shall be run
by which sorts of workmen and to that extent
imply a real restriction on technique. The restric-
tions against dilution are from the point of view
of technique especially significant. Demarcation
matters less ; a job will be done very much the same
way whether it is done by a skilled shipwright
or by a skilled boilermaker. But you cannot put a
semi-skilled or unskilled man or woman on the
work formerly done by a skilled engineer without
changing the method of production. You must
split up the job into simpler processes, fit the ma-
chine with jigs or other fool-proof contrivances,
and in general standardize your work so that it
can be done on automatic machines. It is just be-
cause changes of this sort have been made and
found immensely profitable that the issue is so
significant. This was the general tendency of
** scientific management" even before the war; the
war greatly emphasized the tendency by its
demand for standardized munition production.
"Industrial methods have been changing," writes
Mr. J. T. Murphy in The Workers' Committee,
"until the all-round mechanic, for example, is the
exception and not the rule. Specialization has
progressed by leaps and bounds. Automatic ma-
chine production has vastly increased, Appren-

RESTRICTION AND RESTRICTIONS 183

ticeship in thousands of cases is a farce, for even
the apprentices are kept on repetition work and
have become a species of cheap labor. ... It will
be thus clearly perceived that every simplification
in the methods of production, every application of
machinery in place of hand production, means that
the way becomes easier for others to enter the
trade." This is taken from an argument against
craft unionism; it should be somewhat discounted
since it is based on engineering, the one industry
most affected by the change, and since it is based
on war-time experience, when the demand was
more standardized than peace-time demand is
likely to be. But there is no question whatever
that the general movement of industrial technique
is towards specialization, and that the trade union
rules against dilution are a restriction on that
tendency. This control is purely negative, and
purely a defence of old customary rights ; the rules
were never thought of as implying a right to say
what should be done; but it has been suggested
that even without the war a demand for positive
control would have arisen as a quid pro quo for
the yielding of these restrictive regulations. The
possibility of the removal of all such restrictions on
technique is even stated in a pamphlet written in
1919 as sequel to the Miner's Next Step — the
price for removal being positive workers' con-
trol:—

184 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

"The disastrous grasping policy of the mine owner
has had the result of causing the workmen to erect a code
of customs and rules, designed to protect their wages
and conditions. These act directly in restraint of pro-
duction, as well as of the owners' greed. Remove this
code by removing its cause, and the management of a
mine loses three-fourths of its worries, while it at least
doubles its efficiency." {Industrial Democracy for
Miners, p. 11.)

I suppose few accounts of restrictions on tech-
nique have been written without an emphasis on
the objection to machinery. Historically of great
interest, it is a nearly dead issue now. In the
years 1911, 1912 and 1913, there were two strikes
against the introduction of machinery (one of Glass
Bottle Makers, the other of Dockers) and one
against the use of a portable instead of a sta-
tionary drill (Boilermakers). Less than a thou-
sand men were directly involved ia these three
strikes; as against that 6,500 Ironfounders were
in 1912 engaged in a dispute which was settled as
follows : —

** Employers' Assurances accepted by men as to im-
mediate steps being taken to improve output."

No doubt the restrictions on technique have
materially interfered with industrial innovations;
Mr. Cole speaks of the trade unions in the past as
** extremely bad and partial judges of new indus-

RESTRICTION AND RESTRICTIONS 185

trial processes." But it is a mistake to think of
trade union regulation of technique as a series of
flat negatives and flat opposition to change. That
this is not true — that the issue is more often the
conditions of change and the right to be consulted
and is even sometimes an insistence by the union
on improved technique — it is the business of the
next two sections to show.

XIV

TECHNIQUE: CONSULTATION OVER
CHANGES

A CHANGE in technique is a change in the condi-
tions of work. It is therefore natural on the gen-
eral principles of collective bargaining to expect to
find the claim and practice of consultation over
changes in technique. Bargaining over the condi-
tions of change is far more important in the pres-
ent labor situation than a mere opposition to
change. The real objection is to unregulated
change. * * The typical dispute is to-day a dispute
as to terms," said the "Webbs in 1891; certainly it
is no less true now. As long ago as 1864, the
Executive of the Ironmoulders advised its
members : —

"It may go against the grain for us to fraternize
with what we consider innovations, but depend upon it,
it wiU be our best policy to lay hold of these improve-
ments and make them subservient to our best interests. ' '

Apparently fraternizing with innovations now
goes less against the trade union grain; in many
unions is it a long-established commonplace; in
most it is no new thing. Even a conservative old

186

CONSULTATION OVER CHANGES 187

union like the Yorkshire Glass Bottle Makers
agrees : —

' * That the workmen are willing to adopt other methods
of working than the Yorkshire method, providing satis-
factory terms and conditions be agreed upon between
the manufacturers and the workmen through their re-
presentatives,"

Laying hold of these improvements and making
them subservient — or at least not positively harm-
ful— to the workers' interests is a cardinal point
in. trade union policy.

The unions have used various methods to save
their members from the immediate hardships so
often connected with changes in technique. The
simplest is, of course, merely to secure an under-
taking that wages will not be lowered, for
example : — <

* * The owners shall be at liberty to adopt such improved
methods of screening and cleaning as they may consider
necessary, provided that any methods so adopted shall
not in any way prejudicially effect the wages of the
workman."

This does not meet the far more serious changes
where the fear is that members of the trade will
be permanently displaced. An agreement under
which the Leek Silk Weavers consented to the in-
troduction of two-loom weaving contained the

188 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

''Employers' Undertaking . . . not to discharge
any man in order to initiate the two-loom sys-
tem." Another method is to secure an arrange-
ment by which the workers who would otherwise
have been thrown out of work by a new invention
or a new process are secured the first chance to
learn and do the new job. The best known example
of this was the printing trade; the linotype was
introduced in 1894 into the offices of London news-
papers under the following agreement : —

"All skilled operators . . . shall be members of the
London Society of Compositors, preference being given
to members of the Companionship into which the ma-
chines are introduced. . . .

"A Probationary Period of three months shall be
allowed the operator to receive his average weekly earn-
ings for the previous three months."

A strike of Scottish Bookbinders in 1912 secured
the principles : —

"Qualified tradesmen to have first claim upon all ma-
chinery introduced in future displacing qualified male
labor and to be paid standard wages."

Similar, if less formal, arrangements have been
made in other changing trades, as for example in
pottery when ''casting" began to replace "press-
ing."
The conditions under which the unions during

CONSULTATION OVER CHANGES 189

the war accepted dilution, and the clause
already quoted from the Munition Act forbidding
restrictive regulations, are interesting not only- as
embodying particular safeguards, e.g. that the
"rate for the job" be maintained even if less
skilled labor is put on it,^ but because the Act
laid down the general principle of the right to
consultation on changes in methods of work. Sec-
tion 7 of Schedule II reads: —

"Due notice shall be given to the workmen concerned
wherever practicable of any changes of working con-
ditions which it is desired to introduce as a result of
the establishment becoming a controlled establishment,
and opportunity for local consultation with workmen
or their representatives shall be given if desired."

The Commissioners on Industrial Unrest (1917)
reported that the non-enforcement of this clause
— or perhaps the free use of the saving phrase
"wherever practicable" — was a cause of unrest.
This right to consultation was naturally one of
the claims of the shop stewards — a claim evidently
enforced while the shortage of labor gave them
their opportunity. Their rules at Coventry read
as follows on the point : —

* It is said that this provision was badly observed, partly be-
cause the skilled men were not at all anxious to keep up the
dilutees' wages, even though it was for their own after-war in-
terest. The attitude more often adopted by trade union officials,
however, was to place on " the rate for the job " an interpreta-
tion which made diluted labor expensive, so using the rate as a
means of hampering dilution.

190 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

"That all proposed changes to existing shop practices
and trade union conditions in the shop shall be first
notified to the Shop Stewards of that department
through the Chief Convenor of Shop Stewards."

The great but unrecorded powers of certain en-
gineering shop stewards during the war in fact
represent the highest degree of the practice of con-
sultation. It is true that this consisted largely in
fighting over wage questions (as in the case of the
Manchester committee that is said to have spent
27 hours of one week in meetings with the man-
agement), but it at least involved in practice de-
tailed discussion of technical problems and changes
and in theory a recognition of a right to consulta-
tion over technique. In an extreme case on the
Clyde, the steward in each shop, in consultation
with the foreman, practically determined the dis-
tribution of work within the shop, and similarly
the convenor of shop stewards discussed with the
works manager the allocation of work between
departments and was even shown the firm's books.
It even became in this case the custom for notices
posted by the manager announcing a change in
working rules to be countersigned by the men's
representative ; when this was not done, the work-
men said: — **It's no signed by MacManus," and
disregarded it.

It is only here with the recognition of a right

CONSULTATION OVER CHANGES 191

or principle of consultation over changes in tech-
nique that we come really to control in a proper
sense of the word. The former instances are, after
all, not much more than special cases of bargain-
ing; but an established claim to be coi 5ulted in
every technical change is at least the ')asis for
considerable control. It is difficult to draw any
very valid distinction between consultation and
bargaining ; yet consultation over changes in tech-
nique very Often may mean more than a mere
chance to bargain over terms of a change before
it happens; it often means a real, though not
always an important, give-and-take of advice and
opinion on the advisability of a change. An illus-
tration of the most rudimentary form of this might
be taken from the experience of a somewhat pater-
nalistic forging firm, that had consulted its work-
men over some detail of the time-keeping arrange-
ments. The attitude of the men is said to have
been this: — "The Directors couldn't even do a
little thing like that without consulting us." A
foreman in one of the National Factories attri-
buted the success of his factory and the good feel-
ing in it largely to the practice of the management
in discussing both with a foremen's and a worker's
committee the work ahead and the means of doing
it. On a much greater scale the same claim was
put forward in the House of Commons by Mr.
Brace, one of the Miners' Members, in the impor-

192 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

tant debate on tlie increase of coal prices (July
14, 1919) :—

"Why were we not taken into consultation? . . .
Very nearly on the last day of the Coal Commission the
Miners' Federation of G-reat Britain representatives
made an earnest appeal that they should be allowed to
co-operate with the Government in finding a way for
dealing with the reduction in output, and the reply we
had, very much later, was 6/- a ton increase on the price
of coal."

The same idea is of course a central one of the
whole scheme of the Whitley and Works Commit-
tees reports, and has perhaps been sufficiently
advertised by them. But the right to take a share
in the deciding on new industrial processes is a
real part of the forward program of an important
fraction of the trade union movement.

In order to make concrete the references to the
actual and proposed recognitions of the ' * right to
consultation," I think it is worth while to quote in
full the Treasury Agreement of 1915 — on which
the Munitions Act and the official Government
policy on changes in technique during the war
were based — and, for comparison with it, a com-
prehensive scheme drawn up by a committee of
workers representing the Clyde engineering and
shipbuilding trades to meet the same problem of
dilution and the changes necessary for war-time

CONSULTATION OVER CHANGES 193

production. The first document was the result of a
conference between Mr. Lloyd George, then Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer, and representatives of the
chief munition-making unions. It represented the
terms — and the degree of consultation — under
which most of the official trade union leaders con-
sented to give up for the war their restrictions
against dilution. The second scheme was drawn up
by Mr. John Muir and other leaders of the shop
stewards' movement on the Clyde. It was rejected
by the Government — Mr. Lloyd George declaring
that he couldn't ''carry on an industrial revolu-
tion in the middle of a world war" — and several of
its authors were shortly in prison as revolution-
ists. The scheme was a war-time one and there-
fore did not have to face the problem of unemploy-
ment as the background of trade union regula-
tions. It is, however, of great interest in tying to-
gether the threads of this and the last section — ^the
network of restrictions and the conditions of and
consultations over their removal — and in pointing
the way to the next section — on trade union in-
sistences on improvements in technique. It repre-
sents a definite attempt on the part of a group of
workers to pass from negative to positive, and
from obstructive to responsible, control of in-
dustry, '

194 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

THE TREASURY AGREEMENT

"The Workmen's Representatives at the Conference
will recommend to their members the following proposals
with a view to accelerating the output of munitions and
equipments of war: —

(1) During the war period there shall in no case be
any stoppage of work upon munitions and equipments
of war or other work required for a satisfactory com-
pletion of the war.

All differences on wages or conditions of employment
arising out of the war shall be dealt with without stop-
page in accordance with paragraph (2).

Questions not arising out of the war should not be
made the cause of stoppage during the war period.

(2) Subject to any existing agreements or methods
now prevailing for the settlement of disputes, differences
of a purely individual or local character shall unless
mutually arranged be the subject of a deputation to
the firm employing the workmen concerned, and dif-
ferences of a general character affecting wages and con-
ditions of employment arising out of the war shall be
the subject of Conferences between the parties.

In all cases of failure to reach a settlement of disputes
by the parties directly concerned, or their representa-
tives, or under existing agreements, the matter in dis-
pute shall be dealt with under any one of the three
following alternatives as may be mutually agreed, or,
in default of agreement, settled by the Board of Trade.

(a) The Committee on Production.

(b) A single arbitrator agreed upon by the parties

or appointed by the Board of Trade.

(c) A court of arbitration upon which Labor is

represented equally with the employers.

CONSULTATION OVER CHANGES 195

(3) An Advisory Committee representative of the
organized workers engaged in production for Govern-
ment requirements shall be appointed by the Government
for the purpose of facilitating the carrying out of these
recommendations and for consultation by the Govern-
ment or by the workmen concerned.

(4) Provided that the conditions set out in paragraph
(5) are accepted by the Government as applicable to
all contracts for the execution of war munitions and
equipments, the workmen's representatives at the Con-
ference are of opinion that during the war period the
relaxation of the present trade practices is imperative,
and that each Union be recommended to take into fav-
orable consideration such changes in working conditions
or trade customs as may be necessary with a view to
accelerating the output of war munitions or equip-
ments.

(5) The reconmiendations contained in paragraph (4)
are conditional on the Government requiring all con-
tractors and sub-contractors engaged on munitions and
equipments of war or other work required for the satis-
factory completion of the war to give an undertaking
to the following effect: —

Any departure during the war from the practice rul-
ing in our workshops, shipyards, and other industries
prior to the war, shall only be for the period of the war.

No change in practice made during the war shall be
allowed to prejudice the position of the work people in
our employment or of their Trade Unions in regard to
the resumption and maintenance after the war of any
rules or customs existing prior to the war.

In any readjustment of staff which may have to be
effected after the war, priority of employment will be

196 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

given to workmen in our employment at the beginning
of the war who are serving with the colors or who are
now in our employment.

Where the custom of a shop is changed during the
war by the introduction of semi-skilled men to perform
work hitherto performed by a class of workmen of higher
skill, the rates paid shall be the usual rates of the district
for that class of work.

The relaxation of existing demarcation restrictions or
admission of semi-skilled or female labor shall not affect
adversely the rates customarily paid for the job. In
cases where men who ordinarily do the work are ad-
versely affected thereby, the necessary readjustments
shall be made so that they can maintain tlieir previous
earnings.

A record of the nature of the departures from the
conditions prevailing before the date of this undertak-
ing shall be kept and shall be open for inspection by the
authorized representative of the Government.

Due notice shall be given to the workmen concerned,
wherever practicable, of any changes of working con-
ditions which it is desired to introduce as the result of
this arrangement, and opportunity of local consultation
with the men or their representatives shall be given if
desired.

All differences with our workmen engaged on Govern-
ment work arising out of changes so introduced, or with
regard to wages or conditions of employment arising
out of the war, shall be settled without stoppage of
work in accordance with the procedure laid down in
paragraph (2).

It is clearly understood that, except as expressly pro-
vided in the fourth paragraph of clause 5, nothing in

CONSULTATION OVER CHANGES 197

this undertaking is to prejudice the position of employ-
ers or employees after the war.

D. Lloyd George.
Walter Runeiman.
Arthur Henderson
(Chairman of Workmen's Representatives).

Wm. Mosses
(Secretary of Workmen's Representatives).
March 19, 1915.

THE CLYDE DILUTION SCHEME

"The Clyde District Committee of the Federation of
Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades, which repre-
sents all the workers in the industries mentioned, are
ready to co-operate with the Admiralty Shipyard Labor
Committee for the Clyde in accelerating all work
required by that Department, wherever possible, in the
national emergency.

We believe that with greater co-ordination and better
distribution of labor, the present admittedly high stand-
ard of output can be further improved upon.

Therefore it is agreed that: — •

(1) The existing members of the Unions affiliated to
the Federation will be used to the best advantage.

(2) If at any time the Central Board hereinafter men-
tioned are satisfied that any rule or custom tends to re-
strict output, it shall be suspended for the duration of
the war.

(3) Pneumatic, hydraulic, electric, oxy-acetylene and
all other time and labor-saving devices will be adopted
and used to the fullest practicable extent.

(4) There shall be interchangeability of work between
the members of any particular Union affiliated to the

198 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Federation and to effect that purpose all lines of de-
marcation between members of that Union shall be
suspended for the period of the War.

(5) For the period of the War all allocation of work
between the different Shipyard Unions will be sus-
pended, and the work performed by the members of
the Shipyard Unions will be interchangeable, it being
agreed that any work of one Shipyard Union performed
by the members of another Shipyard Union shall not
form any precedent after the War.

(6) When in any particular trade men are unobtain-
able, and the work is of such a character, or the con-
ditions such as to enable the labor introduced to per-
form the work with reasonable efficiency, skilled men
from allied trades and semi-skilled and unskilled men
and (where the work is appropriate and the conditions
and surroundings are suitable to their sex) women may
be introduced into the trade of the Unions affiliated to
the Federation.

(7) The relaxation of existing demarcation restric-
tions or admission of semi-skilled or female labor shall
not affect adversely the rates customarily paid for job.
In cases where men who ordinarily do the work are
adversely affected thereby, the necessary readjustment
shall be made so that they can maintain their previous
earnings.

(8) Labor introduced under Clause 6 to do any work
of the Unions affiliated to the Federation shall be under
the supervision of the foreman of the work.

(9) Where overtime is required on any job of the
members of the Unions affiliated to the Federation, to
which labor has been introduced under Clause 6, any
members of the Unions affiliated to the Federation em-
ployed thereon shall have equality of treatment.

CONSULTATION OVER CHANGES 199

(10) In the event of any member of any particular
Union affiliated to the Federation being available for
emplojnnent at his own occupation he shall have the
preference.

(11) A record of the nature of any departure in any
shipbuilding, or ship-repairing establishment from the
conditions prevailing when the establishment became a
controlled establishment shall be kept, and, so far as the
departure affects any Unions affiliated to the Federation,
copies shall be handed to the Society concerned and the
Central Board hereinafter mentioned.

(12) Due notice of any intended change of practice
in any shipbuilding or ship-repairing establishment
shall be given to the Shop Stewards of the Union con-
cerned with their Union representatives.

(13) Facilities shall be given by the employers to
the shop committees to meet when necessary for the pur-
poses of this scheme.

(14) All differences arising out of, or in connection
with this agreement shall, without stoppage of work,
be promptly referred to and settled between the Cen-
tral Board and the Shipyard Labor Committee of the
Admiralty.

(15) Under the scheme of transfer no workman or
workwoman shall suffer any pecuniary loss when trans-
ferred from one Admiralty firm to another; they shall
receive the standard Trade Union district rate of
wages, if on time or piece, plus travelling allowances
according to the War Munitions Volunteer scheme; in
the event of being transferred to work paid at a lower
rate than his or her own rate, the original rate shall be
paid; this practice shall also be carried out in cases of
transfer from one department to another in an Ad-
miralty firm, or from one district to another.

200 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

For the purposes of this scheme the Federation will
establish Shop Committees in the various yards and
engine shops in the Clyde area, under the direction and
control of a Central Board, which will co-operate with
the Shipyard Labor Committee of the Admiralty, to
co-ordinate all efforts for the acceleration of output.

Shop Committees to consist of Shop Stewards now
representing the various Unions in the shops and yards
affiliated to the Federation. Where the present number
of Shop Stewards in any one yard is inadequate, the
Societies concerned will immediately instruct their mem-
bers to appoint a representative by election in the shop
or yard where there is a deficiency, for the purposes
of this scheme.

The duties of Shop Committees shall be to report
where : —

(1) An unnecessary supply of labor prevails;

(2) In the department labor can be more effectively

employed by distribution, transfer, or other-
wise;

(3) Machinery can be more usefully employed;

(4) Machinery can be usefully introduced;

(5) Any other proposals regarded as being condu-

cive to the acceleration of output;

(6) The Committees will each appoint a represen-

tative steward, who will notify the Secretary
of the Central Board immediately it is
thought that increased output can be secured
in any direction.

The duties of the Central Board, which
will be appointed by and be responsible to
the Federation, shall be to investigate all
cases and suggestions submitted to them by
the authorized Shop Committee, and to co-

CONSULTATION OVER CHANGES 201

operate with the Admiralty Board, with a
view to the more effective employment of
labor and machinery in any manner deemed
necessary.

The Central Board shall also be the Board
to whom complaint shall be made with re-
gard to grievances arising out of the appli-
cation of the foregoing scheme."

XV

TECHNIQUE: INSISTENCE ON
IMPROVEMENTS

The unions have blocked certain changes in
technique which they thought would injure their
interests. The unions have laid down conditions
under which changes in technique might be made
without injuring their interests. These are real
forms of control over technique but of negative
control. At the end of the last section there was
a suggestion — in the demands for consultation for
its own sake and in the proposals of the Clyde
Committee — of a positive interest in planning the
technique of industry. We have discussed the
workers' negative interference in technique and
their claim to consultation over technique ; it is the
business of this section to study the cases of work-
ers' insistence on improvements in technique.

Some interest in good technique is a natural
outcome of a highly-developed system of piece
rates in which rate-cutting is prevented. If the
piece workers' earnings depend on the efficiency
of the machines or the quality of the material sup-
plied or the arrangement of the factory, the work-
er's '* facilities " may naturally become a part of

202

INSISTENCE ON IMPROVEMENTS 203

the bargain and the union secretary may even find
himself acting as a semi-ofiicial efficiency inspector.
This was the origin of the long-standing ''bene-
volence ' ' of the cotton unions toward new machin-
ery of which the Webbs wrote as follows : —

"In Lancashire it quickly becomes a grievance in the
Cotton Trade Unions, if any one employer, or any one

district, falls behind the rest No employer takes

the trouble to induce the laggards in his own industry
to keep up with the march of invention. Their falling
behind is indeed an immediate advantage to himself.
But to the Trade Unions, representing all the operatives,
the sluggishness of the poor or stupid employers is a
serious danger. The old-fashioned master spinners, with
slow-going family concerns, complain bitterly of the
harshness with which the Trade Union officials refuse
to make any allowance for their relatively imperfect
machinery, and even insist, as we have seen, on their
paying positively a higher piece-work rate if they do not
work their mills as efficiently as their best-equipped
competitors. Thus, the Amalgamated Association of
Operative Cotton-spinners, instead of obstructing new
machinery, actually penalizes the employer who fails
to introduce it. ' '

"Penalizes" is a word that may suggest too
much; the situation is that the unions allow a re-
duction in piece-work price for the introduction of
more efficient machinery, the effect is to encourage
improvements. It thus becomes the business of the
union secretary to investigate claims of bad ma-

204 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

chinery or bad material (the ''bad spinning" dis-
putes) or, in fact, any inefficiencies in management
that affect the worker's output, and to get them set
right or paid for. Somewhat similar principles
govern the piece-work arrangements of the Boiler-
makers. Their first national agreement admitted
that the employer was ''entitled to a revision of
rates on account of labor-saving devices ' ' and for
' ' improved arrangements in yards. ' ' On the other
hand, the present arrangements provide for the
settlement of complaints from the side of the men
"with respect to insufficiency of pressure, char-
acter of tools, inefficiency of plant, or obstructed
or odd jobs."

A number of strikes have turned on this relation
of industrial technique to piece-rate earnings. One
of the terms of a settlement in a strike of nearly
10,000 workers in the Paisley thread mills, in 1907,
was as follows : —

"Improvements made in arrangements of machinery
enabling higher wages to be earned."

The similar effect of an Ironf ounders ' strike —
in enforcing better technique — has already been
mentioned.

The Miners illustrate several of the steps be-
tween complaints over facilities and actual respon-
sibility for the organization of industry. The is-

INSISTENCE ON IMPROVEMENTS 205

sue again starts with piece work. The hewer is
paid for the amount of coal that gets to the sur-
face; that depends in large part on the supply of
tubs and the arrangements for haulage. Time
spent underground waiting for tubs and the num-
ber of days the pit is closed for lack of the nec-
essary facilities,^ are of direct bearing on the
miners' wage. These are by no means new com-
plaints— a fact worth remembering now that the
output of coal is a subject of public passion and
Parliament is debating pit-props. Sir Eichard
Redmayne, His Majesty's Chief Inspector of
Mines, reminded the Coal Commission that com-
plaints by the workers of lack of tubs, trams, etc.
had been coming in to his department for years.
These complaints were by no means ended
by the passing of the Minimum Wage Act of 1912.
The management can still turn the workers back
at the pithead when there is no work, and the
minimum rates are set below what a man would
naturally earn with good facilities, although one
Miners' agent quotes an official's remark — ''What
do you care? You're on the 'min'l" — to a work-
man complaining of some defect in management.
For the sake of concreteness, it is worth while
to list some of the specific complaints made by the
Miners' leaders, national and local:— too little

*C/. the claims of the United Mine Workers of America in
their recent strike.

206 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

coal-cutting machinery ; too little mechanical haul-
age ; shortage of trains, tubs, rails, horses, and of
timber for pit-props; bad condition of roads;
wagons too big to go through the passageways;
bad distribution of tubs and wagons ; bad distribu-
tion of rolling stock.

Charges of this sort were frequently referred to
in the course of the hearings before the Coal Com-
mission.^ Mr. Herbert Smith gave figures of the
results of an inquiry into shortage of tubs, etc. in
300 Yorkshire pits (Q.27759), and Mr. Hodges
spoke of the ''thousands of instances" of faulty
transport facilities " that were submitted to the
Executive Committee of the South Wales Miners '
Federation when they were putting up their
scheme for increased output" (Q. 7178). Three
references are well worth quoting: —

"Mr. SmUlie. Hardly a day passes but what we get
letters signed from one or other colliery complaining
that the men have been sent home day after day or are in
the pit and are only doing half work, and in some col-
lieries there would be 400 or 500 tons more a day if
there could be a clearance. . . .

Sir Richard Redmayne. I have not the least doubt
in the world you are getting such letters; I get such
letters. ... I have here case after case of detailed
enquiry into such eases. Sometimes I found there was
no shadow of truth in them, sometimes I found there

•EspedaUy Questions 7168, 7178, 7183, 26994, 26995, 27469,
27472, 27759-27790.

INSISTENCE ON IMPROVEMENTS 207

was. ... I cannot think that is the whole truth,
namely, that the cause of the decline in output is
attributable to want of clearance — partially, yes."
(Q. 27007.)

*'Mr. Hodges. This is the report of the check weigher
to his Committee [at a Lancashire colliery] : —

'For the last three months I have been continually
bombarding the management for reasons as to the
shortage of tubs, etc., which the men are constantly
complaining about. During my investigation I found
there have been stoppages of the main haulage roads
through having day-work men working on the haulage
getting the roof down and stopping gangs whilst the
tubs were filled with dirt. On May 15th [1919] four
men came out of the Trencherbone Mine as a protest far
the manner in which they were being treated in regard
to empty tubs. It was 12 o'clock noon when they got
to the surface, and they had not had any empty tub
from 11 o'clock of the previous day. Their tally num-
ber is 63. For the last few weeks the men in the Cran-
berry Mine have been having a bad time of it owing to
the shortage of tubs. ... I have spoken to the fire-
men. They say they are ashamed to go among the men
who have to get their time over the best way possible.' ! "
(Q. 27472.)

"Mr Hodges. Do you know the Nine Mile Point Col-
liery?

Mr. Winstone [President South Wales Miners' Fed-
eration]. Very well.

Mr. Hodges. Do you remember the workmen at that
colliery had to embark on a strike at one time because

208 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

the management were developing the worst seams in the
colliery and leaving the best seams until the market con-
ditions were better and the control lifted?

Mr. Winstone. Yes, they urged the colliery company
to develop a piece of coal which was nearer to the col-
liery, and admitted to be better coal, and which could
not be developed on account of the opposition of the
royalty owner." (Q. 23677-23678.)

The present point is not how far these charges
are justified or how far they explain reduced out-
put. Their real significance for this inquiry is in
showing to what extent the actual problems of man-
agement and business discretion have been made
subjects of trade union demands.

The Miners, then, have a long record of insis-
tences on detailed improvements in the method of
working. One by-product of the war was to give
these complaints something of a responsible status.
The Miners ' Federation was asked by the Grovern-
ment to set up Absentee Committees, such as those
already mentioned, to punish the men who stayed
away from work. In most districts the Miners
refused to do so except on condition that these com-
mittees should also have power to criticize the man-
agement when it was at fault in not providing fac-
ilities : if the worker is to be punished for staying
away from work, their argument ran, why not the
officials for keeping the men idle by mismanage-
ment? The agreement of May 16, 1916, between

INSISTENCE ON IMPROVEMENTS 209

the Executive Committee of the Miners' Federa-
tion and the Parliamentary Committee of the Min-
ing Association, under which the committees were
set up, recognized this dual function: —

* ' That in regard to absenteeism this meeting agrees to
the matter being referred to the districts, on the distinct
understanding that Committees will at once be set up in
each district to devise and put into operation effective
machinery to secure the attendance of all the workmen
employed to the fullest extent, and to inquire into the
circumstances of workmen employed at the mine not
being provided with work when they have presented
themselves at the mine, the intention being to secure, as
far as possible, the output of coal necessary for the
country's needs."

The local application of this principle is well illus-
trated by a miner's account of a large meeting of
coal-owners and Miners' delegates at Stoke-on-
Trent:—

"The meeting of representatives of employers and
employed soon became lively and it showed the intense
interest that was taken in the Government suggestions,
and the men pointed out to the Coal Owners that there
were other causes which caused a reduced output of coal
besides absenteeism: — the faults of the management in
allowing the miners to wait for timber, no facilities in
taking men to their work and bringing them back, the
waiting for tubs through scarcity and uneven distribu-
tion of the same. If they were going to work this

210 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

scheme and draw up rules, they must bring the man-
agement in as well as the men."

A specimen of the provisions for enforcing this
side of the agreement may be taken from the rules
of the North Staffordshire Output Committees : —

"It shall be open to the Pit Committee to consider
the facilities for output, and for the provision of mate-
rial necessary for the proper performance of their work
by the workmen, and to report thereon. If the report
of the Committee imputes negligence on the part of any
official of the mine, a written copy shall be forwarded
to the manager, who shall take such steps as he shall
deem necessarj', in the circumstances, and shall inform
the Committee in writing of the action he has taken, it
being understood that it is the intention for the manager
and his officials to afford all possible reasonable facilities
for output. If the Committee shall not be in agreement
that the steps taken by the manager are satisfactory, it
shall then deal with the case as if the alleged negligence
were a breach of the Rules, and failing agreement the
matter should be reported to the Central Committee for
decision. . . .

The Central Committee shall consider and advise upon
steps to be taken to the further improvement of output
and of maintaining an increased attendance."

The provisions for imposing fines for bad atten-
dance and for working out fines by subsequent
good attendance were similar to those quoted from
the Cleveland ironworks.

So much for the scheme on paper; it repre-

INSISTENCE ON IMPROVEMENTS 211

sents at least a definite and admitted claim (if only
for the period of the war) on the part of the
Miners to the right to insist on technical efficiency.
It is harder to say how much it meant in practice.
The attempt to set up the committees was general
on the part of the Miners' leaders ; at a number of
pits they were unsuccessful. Moreover, the ef-
fectiveness of the committees ' work varied greatly,
though there is no doubt that on the whole atten-
dance was considerably increased. Nor did the
committees in all cases undertake all the functions
suggested above; Lancashire, for example, would
not take the responsibility of finding. Of more
importance for the present point is the fact that
many of the committees failed to carry into force
the insistence on improved facilities. It is true
that Yorkshire reached the point of fining negligent
officials and that many committees reported im-
provements ''which affected the output of coal
and increased the wages of the men" or a greater
keenness on the part of the mines officials to make
sure that no time was lost. Perhaps the most strik-
ing case in which positive responsibility for tech-
nique was assumed by the Miners was at a York-
shire pit, in which the men appointed a controller
to supervise the distribution of tubs underground
and paid half his wages. Mr. Herbert Smith, the
Vice-President of the Miners ' Federation, put the
case before the Coal Commission : —

212 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

"The Mitchel Main employs 1,750 men. I have a let-
ter from a man who was appointed coal controller, down
the pit. I will read you this letter . . . 'Our mem-
bers have been below the district's day's work and some
below the minimum on account of the shortage of tubs.
We can prove this statement and our management can-
not deny it. . . . We have gone to the lengths of ap-
pointing a controller and paid half his wages from our
check, and Mr. Edward J. Peace was appointed to that
position and during the time he was down the mine or-
ganizing the distribution of coal and everything, the
output was a good deal better.' , . . Men were rather
anxious when they paid a man out of their own pockets
to organize?" (Q. 27788.)

But on the other hand many committees were
met with solid opposition in their attempts to con-
sider problems of management. In South Wales
the scheme fell through entirely because of dis-
agreement over the scope of the inquiry. The story
and the disputed clause in the men's scheme came
out before the Coal Commission in the discussion
between Mr. Hodges of the South Wales Miners'
Federation and Mr. Hugh Bramwell representing
the South Wales coal-owners :—

*'Mr. Hodges. I also had the privilege of drafting a
scheme for the establishment of Joint Committees in
South Wales, to which I referred when you were in the
box last, and I remember very distinctly the scheme
coming before you, and you rejected it. You agreed to
several clauses. When it came to this clause you re-
jected it?

INSISTENCE ON IMPROVEMENTS 213

Mr. Bramwell. Yes; we went to the Coal Controller
about that.

Mr. Hodges. Here the workmen made certain propo-
sitions to you which they thought would be really
helpful?

Mr. BramweU. Yes; they interfered with the man-
agement.

Mr. Hodges. I will read them. ' The Committee shall
receive reports from the Management and Workmen on
matters affecting output, such as:

(a) Shortage of trams and road materials.

(b) Shortage of, or unsuitable, timber.

(c) Bad haulage roads and inadequate haulage.

(d) And any other cause which in their opinion is

likely to interfere with the smooth working
of the mine or interfere with the production
of the largest output.'

You rejected the scheme because it contained that
clause ?

Mr. Bramwell. That was, I think, one clause we ob-
jected to. We went to the Coal Controller with you
about it. The Coal Controller offered us the scheme
which was accepted by the bulk of the other coalfields.
It was you who rejected that.

Mr. Hodges. Certainly. I remember it and I con-
fess it because the Coal Controller's scheme was
felt by the South Wales Miners that it did not give
them ?

Mr. Bramwell. Because it did not give them power
to interfere with the management.

Mr. Hodges. That is so. Not to interfere with the
manager in his work, but it did not give them power to
make suggestions as to how the work should be carried
on successfully?

214 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Mr. Bramwell. It was not a question of suggestions. ' '
(Q. 21186-21190.)

Moreover the principle of the right to make tech-
nical criticisms was not always enforced even
where formally conceded. In some cases the work-
ers* side did not dare bring up the question or else
simply let their opportunities pass. And a large
number of committees definitely broke down in
disputes over this issue.

This experience is worth setting out in such de-
tail, because it brings us again to a consciously felt
"frontier of control." The quality of the innova-
tion that this trade union insistence on technique
implied may be indicated by the grounds on which
it was opposed by a minority of miners and a num-
ber of managers. Some of the former called it
doing the employer's work. "When the miners'
leaders began to draw the miners ' attention to the
loss of turns and pointed out to them that, if they
only increased their attendance a little, it would
increase the output by 13 million tons of coal, they
soon told their leaders that it was the business of
the employer to talk like that." Trade union offi-
cials were not paid for ' ' advocating increased out-
put which would only affect the coal-owner." On
the other hand, as shown in Mr. Bramwell 's testi-
mony; managers felt that it was interfering with
management and taking the management out of

INSISTENCE ON IMPROVEMENTS 215

their hands. When a trade union is found vigor-
ously doing the employer's work and taking it out
of the management's hands, the case comes very
near the center of the problem of control.

It is this background of quarrels and responsi-
bilities regarding problems of actual production
that makes somewhat less astonishing the part
played by the Miners' Federation in the Coal Com-
mission's inquiry. Their claim was not merely
that the mine-workers should have higher wages
and shorter hours ; but that these demands could
be met by improving the organization of the in-
dustry; and that the Miners were prepared both
to suggest and to help carry out the necessary im-
provements. Detailed evidence of the technical
defects of the industry was a more important part
of the Miners' case than even the reports of the
conditions of their housing.^ *'I want the mines
nationalized," said Mr. Smillie on the occasion
of a recent deputation to the Prime Minister, '*in
order that, by the fullest possible development
on intelligent lines, with the assistance of the en-
gineering power which we know we possess
and the inventions which we know we pos-
sess, we might largely develop the mines and
increase the output. That is one of our first
claims."

• E.g., Coal Commission Evidence, vol. I, pp. 321-322.

216 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

These cases in which the organized pressure of
the trade unions is on the side of improvements in
technique are emphasized, not as of frequent oc-
currence outside the industries named, but as the
furthest extensions of constructive control. There
are other instances of suggestions for improve-
ment made by groups of workers still to be con-
sidered; the present section deals only with those
in which improved technique has been definitely
something for the trade union to fight for.

XVI

TECHNIQUE: SUGGESTIONS AND
INVENTIONS

The positive interferences in technique already
mentioned had their beginnings, at least, in the
demand for facilities for piece-work earnings. I
do not mean that this is the only factor ; the signi-
ficant transition in motives from wages to work-
manship has already been suggested. Still the be-
ginnings were piece work, and the interferences
were backed by the organized force of the unions.
There are, however, other cases of an interest on
the part of groups of workers in the betterment
of technique which are not so immediately bound
up with piece-work earnings and which are not
to the same extent enforced by the unions. They
are not, then, insistences on improvements; they
are better classed as suggestions and inventions.
Not as significant from the point of view of con-
trol as those just mentioned, they are, neverthe-
less, interesting as indicating some degree of joint
action in the development of industrial technique.
The work of the individual inventor is beside
our point, except as he is encouraged and protected
by collective action. I heard a group of Midland

217

218 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

working-class students debating with great inter-
est the encouragement and protection of inven-
tors and the state of the patent laws ; they made
no suggestion that it might be a subject for trade
union and works committee action. Similarly the
various schemes of individual firms for encourag-
ing inventions and suggestions, — from the mere
provision of ' ' suggestion boxes ' ' to the long-stand-
ing and successful systems of awards for inven-
tions in force at William Denny's shipbuilding
yard at Dumbarton and at Barr and Stroud's en-
gineering works at Glasgow and the similar scheme
introduced in March, 1919, at Cadbury's cocoa
works at Bourneville which produced 759 sug-
gestions in the first seven months — are not
cases of workers' control; though it is hardly a
coincidence that the first firm mentioned was, as
pointed out by D. F. Schloss, a pioneer in devolu-
tion of responsibility to groups of workers and
that all three have highly developed works com-
mittees.

A works committee is of course hardly likely
to make inventions ; that is not a political function.
It may, as the Ministry of Labor's report on Works
Committees suggests, do two things: — (1) create
an atmosphere which will encourage the making of
suggestions and (2) provide the machinery, by
sub-committee or otherwise, for stimulating an
interest in and for considering and testing inven-

SUGGESTIONS AND INVENTIONS 219

tions. As an illustration of the need for the first,
the former labor superintendent of an engineering
firm told me of a man who had been victimized by
his foreman for suggesting to the manager an im-
provement in process. A sub-committee with a
part of the latter function has just (October, 1919)
been set up at Cadbury's at the suggestion of the
workers' side of the Works Council. It is called the
''Brains Committee" and its object is to hunt for
promising talent among the employees. The works
manager describes it as the ''most talked-of thing
in the works. ' ' The encouragement of inventions
was clearly intended as an important part of the
Whitley scheme. The following is a typical clause
from the list of functions of a Joint Industrial
Council : —

"The provision of facilities for the full consideration
and utilization of inventions and improvements designed
by work people and for the adequate safeguarding of the
rights of the designers of such improvements." (Paint
Color and varnish Industry.)

So much for inventions proper; there is still
the field of suggestions in regard to meeting the
various practical problems of organization and
the planning of work. This is obviously a more
natural subject for group action than the former ;
of this sort were the suggestions made by the Out-
put Committees referred to in the last section.

220 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Many works committees have discussed the actual
arrangement of work ; the report by the Ministry
of Labor says that ''testimony to the value of
suggestions [made by them] . . . has been received
from employers." The suggestions reported were
usually on minor matters of detail; in one inter-
esting case, however, a committee of pattern-mak-
ers suggested, as an alternative to dilution, the pur-
chase of certain tools and brought about a 50%
increase of output/ A recent instance is even
more striking. The British Westinghouse Co.
was considering closing do^vn its foundry on
account of the high cost of production. The
works manager put the proposal before his
shop stewards' committee. The committee ob-
jected and asked for two weeks in which to
collect statistics of wages in other foundries in
order to show that the high cost of production was
not due to high wages. These figures were pre-
sented and indicated that the wages in the foundry
were, if anything, lower than in competing ones.
The committee argued that this showed that the
trouble was one of organization and asked for an-
other two weeks in which to prepare suggestions.
At the end of that time the committee presented
a memorandum on foundry organization — which
the works manager described as the ablest he had

' p. 30, Works Committees, Industrial Report No. 2, Ministry
of Labor.

SUGGESTIONS ANt> INVENTIONS 221

ever seen, and the firm has decided to keep the
foundry going and to spend hundreds of pounds in
carrying out the committee's suggestions. The
encouragement of suggestions is of course an
integral part of the Whitley idea. The third re-
port of the Whitley committee says of the works
committees : —

"They should always keep in the forefront the idea
of constructive co-operation in the improvement of the
industry to which they belong. Suggestions of all kinds
tending to improvement should be frankly welcomed and
freely discussed. Practical proposals should be exam-
ined from all points of view. There is an undeveloped
asset of constructive ability — ^valuable alike to the in-
dustry and to the State — awaiting the means of reali-
zation. ' '

These read like merely pious and peace-loving
phrases; the argument from the waste of ability
in a system which discourages suggestions, how-
ever, I have heard from both sides, — from the
head of the labor department of a manufacturers*
association ; from a foreman in one of the National
Factories where suggestions had been taken from
both the foremen's and the workmen's com-
mittees, and, most strikingly, in Mr. William
Straker's evidently sincere reference before the
Coal Commission to the ''coal-owners' huge blun-
der" in neglecting to use the practical ability
of the men. "For a generation," says the first

222 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Sankey report (signed by the Chairman and
three employer members of the Coal Commission),
**the colliery worker has been educated socially
and technically. The result is a great national
asset. Why not use it?"

These are mainly arguments for what might be ;
the actual instances of workers' activity under
this head amount to comparatively little. The
organization of the facilities for invention and
suggestions may become an important function of
joint committees. It implies a direct assumption
of a degree of interest in and responsibility for
technique. At the moment, however, it is a much
less significant form of workers ' control than that
collective enforcing of industrial efficiency men-
tioned under the ** Insistence on Improvements."

XVII
TRADE POLICY: JOINT ACTION

Thebe are still other people who write about
control who make a distinction similar to that
used in the transition from discipline to technique
Their argument runs like this: — The workers
should have much to say about the immediate
processes of production, which are the stuff of
their daily life ; but general trade policy — ^buying
and selling, exchange, the market, the adjustment
of supply and demand, large-scale research and
planning — is obviously not their business. Again
the moral may be disregarded and the distinction
used for classification. Again, however, it must
be recognized that it is not a rigid one: — unem-
ployment, for example, is clearly a matter of gen-
eral trade policy; there is no sharply logical line
that sets off the invention of a device invented for
use in a particular shop, from the organization of
research for a great industry. And it will again
be seen, in this and the following section, that the
unions have not kept neatly to one side of the
demarcation laid down in the theory. The present
section will consider cases in which the unions
have acted jointly with the employers in these

228

224 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

matters; the next with cases of independent ac-
tion or demands on the part of the workers,

A loose sort of joint action between employers*
and workmen's organizations for the common pur-
poses of their industries is of course no new thing.
A rudimentary provision for it — ^now superseded
by a Joint Industrial Council — is found in the
rules of the conciliation boards in the building
trades : —

"Although the principal objects of the Conciliation
Boards are the settlement of disputes . . ., it shall
also be within their province to meet and discuss any
question of trade interest at the request of any of the
parties to the agreement."

Apparently legislation was one of the trade ques-
tions intended. The Plumbers' board made this
object more specific: —

"To consider any question affecting the Plumbing
trade and to procure the improvement of any existing
laws, usages and customs, which the Bosrd may consider
to be prejudicial to the trade, and to amend or oppose
legislation or other measures or the establishment of any
usages or customs which in the opinion of the Board
might prejudicially affect our Craft."

The cotton industry gives the best examples of
this sort of joint action. The Oldham agreement
reads : —

TRADE POLICY: JOINT ACTION 225

"It is agreed that in respect to the opening of new
markets abroad, the alteration of restrictive foreign
tariffs and other similar matters which may benefit or
injure the cotton trade, the same shall be dealt with by
a Committee of three or more from each Federation, all
the Associations agreeing to bring the whole weight of
their influence to bear in furthering the general interests
of the cotton industry in this country."

This clause has not been at all a dead letter; as
witness the recent project of a trip to India and
the United States by a party of cotton manufac-
turers and union leaders, and the well-known
readiness with which both sides of the cotton in-
dustry will rally against Government interference
— or answer the cry of Lancashire against London.
The logical, though infrequent, extension of the
sort of co-operation suggested in the agreement
mentioned is definite combination to fix prices
** thereby securing better profits to manufacturers
and better profits to work people ' ' at the consum-
er's expense or to secure tariff or other preferen-
tial advantages. The former is evidently aimed
at in the rules of the conciliation board for china
manufacture : —

** Mutual Trade Alliance. ... No Member of the
Manufacturers' Association shall employ any workman
who is not a Member of the Operatives' Association, and
no workman shall take employment under any manu-
facturer who is not a Member of the Manufacturers'

226 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Association, or who is selling his goods at lower prices
than those which from time to time are decided upon."
(Italics mine.)

The ** Birmingham Alliances," in six branches
of the light metal trades, contain the same arrange-
ment and the definite stipulation that prices are
to be set by a ''Wages Board, to be formed of an
equal number of employers and employed. ' ' The
latter object — combination for trade war purposes
— is sometimes said to be a main part of the Whit-
ley scheme. ''His (the Minister of Labor's)
idea," said a trade union journal, "appears to be
that joint bodies of employers and employed will
be excellent institutions to conduct a trade war
after the war." Some color is given to this view
by the activity of one or two of the Joint Coun-
cils in asking for tariff advantages^ and " anti-
dumping" laws.

It is not fair, however, to suggest this as the
only motive behind the Whitley scheme or even its
chief outlet for joint action on trade policy. The
first stated object of a Joint Industrial Council
usually reads something like this: —

' Cf., the sneer in one of the Daily Herald's " Hymns of Re-
construction,"—

"Whitley Councils.
Two opposite sides,
Two opposite sides,
See how they agree.
See how they agree!
They both are after Protection for trade
That is the way that profits are made:
No better example of mutual aid
Than two opposite sides."

TRADE POLICY: JOINT ACTION 227

"To secure the largest possible measure of joint action
between the employers and work people for the safe-
guarding and development of the industry as a part of
national life." (Bobbin and Shuttle Making Industry.)

The proposal by Mr. Malcolm Sparkes, a Lon-
don master builder, which led to the formation of
the Joint Industrial Council for the building
trades began as follows:—

"The interests of employers and employed are in
many respects opposed; but they have a common inter-
est in promoting the efficiency and status of the service
in which they are engaged and in advancing the well-
being of its personnel."

And the phrase — "the industry as a national
service" — ^has at least got from the building
trades constitution into the conversation of local
leaders. How much all this means in practice it is
too early to say.

It is worth while, however, to look at some of the
specific functions suggested under the head of this
broad generalization. "The consideration of
measures for regularizing production and employ-
ment" and the provisions for encouraging and
protecting inventors have been mentioned in earl-
ier sections. The Council for the Silk Industry
(among others) provides for: —

* ' The regular consideration of, and the compilation of,
available . statistics as to wages, working costs, fluctua-

228 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

tions in the cost of materials and Customs tariffs, and
the study and promotion of scientific and practical sys-
tems of account keeping."

A number of constitutions have clauses such as
the following:—

"The encouragement of study and research with a
view to the improvement and perfection of the quality
of the product, and of machinery and methods of eco-
nomical manufacture in all branches of the industry."
(Match Manufacturing Industry.)

The program for the building trades council
already quoted was even more specific in stating a
similar object : —

"Continuous and Progressive Improvement — To pro-
vide a Clearing House for ideas, and to investigate, in
conjunction with experts, every suggested line of im-
provement including, for example, such questions as: —
Industrial Control and Status of Labor.
Scientific Management and Increase of Output.
Welfare Methods.

Closer association between commercial and aesthetic
requirements. ' '

It is again too early to say bow much these proj-
ects mean. A sub-committee of the Building
Trades Parliament is making an attempt to pro-
vide the basis for a complete reorganization of the
industry. Its interim report on Organized Public
Service in the Building Industry,^ known as the

' See Note on Sources.

TRADE POLICY: JOINT ACTION 229

*' Foster Report," has already been referred to
under ''Unemployment." Its recommendations,
however, go much further than was there in-
dicated. In addition to the provisions for making
unemployment a charge on the industry and for
the regularization of employment, the report rec-
ommends a regulation of the Wages of Manage-
ment (on lines admittedly not yet worked out), a
limitation and guarantee by the industry as a
whole of the rate of interest on capital, and the
disposal of the surplus earnings of the industry
at the discretion of the Council. The detailed pro-
visions under the last two heads are as follows : —

'*The Hiring of Capital.
36. We recommend that approved capital, invested in
the Building Industry, and registered annually after
audit, shall receive a limite-d but guaranteed rate of in-
terest, bearing a definite relation to the average yield
of the most remunerative Government Stock. The fixing
of the ratio will have to be worked out by further in-
vestigation, but we recommend that once determined
upon, the guarantee shall apply to all firms in the
Industry, except where failure to earn the aforesaid rate
is declared by the Committee on the advice of the
auditors to be due to incompetent management. . . .
The Surplus Earnings of the Industrff.
40. . . . We, therefore, recommend:

(a) That the amount of the surplus earnings of the
Industry shall be publicly declared every
year, and accompanied by a schedule of the
services to which the money has been voted.

230 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

(b) That it shall be held in trust by a National
Joint Committee of the Building Trades In-
dustrial Council, and shall be applied to the
following common services, which will be de-
veloped under the control of the Industry as
a whole: —

1. Guarantee of Interest on approved capital, as
outlined in paragraph 36.

2. Loans to firms in the Industry for purposes

of development.

3. Education and research in various directions

for improvement of the Industry, both in-
dependently and in co-operation with other
industries.

4. Superannuation scheme for the whole regis-

tered personnel of the Industry,

5. Replacement of approved capital lost through

no fault of the management.

6. Such other purposes as may be thought ad-

visable. ' '

This project was vigorously and seriously debated
at one meeting of the Building Trades Parliament
and has been referred back to the same Commit-
tee for further consideration.

All these things mean the possibility of joint
action, though in most cases they mean little
activity on the part of the rank and file of work-
ers, on a wide field of questions. For a review
of the present situation in regard to control, how-
ever, they must be heavily discounted. In the
older forms of joint action, those that are more

TRADE POLICY: JOINT ACTION 231

purely for the sake of protection or prices, there
is little evidence of labor acting as anything but
a very junior partner; the newer forms are still
almost entirely on paper.

This does not at all exhaust the account of cases
of joint action on matters of business policy. As
has already been suggested in earlier sections —
for example in the account of the Westinghouse
works committee's advice on foundry organization
— certain individual firms have given opportuni-
ties for discussion at least on questions that would
surely be classed under the heading of trade
policy. A number of firms make the practice of
telling their works committees about their pros-
pective contracts, etc., and in some cases report
considerable keenness on the part of their commit-
tees in discussing them. There was during the
war a very striking experiment of real workers'
control in this and in every field at a Newcastle
aircraft factory — John Dawson and Co., Ltd. A
joint body representing management and workers
exercised almost the full powers of an ordinary
board of directors. *'The business of the Works
Council," says the pamphlet edited by its secretary
and published in March, 1919 under the title of
Democratic Control the Key to Industrial Pro-
gress, *'is to control matters of policy, consider
and decide upon extension or contraction of busi-
ness, and to provide for the maintenance of output.

232 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

The Workers' Representatives are elected by bal-
lot, and have an equal voice with the Management
Representatives in all decisions. There being no
casting vote it is essential that both sides agree by
a majority upon any question that may arise. In
the absence of an agreement the subject would
remain in abeyance until a common ground of
action could be arrived at ... . Broadly speak-
ing, the functions of the Works Council may be
defined as those of a Management Council which
issues its decisions to the Executive Staff for that
Staif to carry into effect.

The decisions of the Works Council on matters
of policy are of necessity subject in all cases to
the control of the Directors in regard to finance
. . . The Directors have the responsibility of con-
trolling the finance and sales organization of the
Company, and the general work of the Staff.
Whilst they are unfettered in regard to the exer-
cise of their powers, the Works Council may call
for, and in fact receives, all information in regard
to the policy of the management, expansion of
business and results of operations undertaken."
The exclusion of the Works Council from financial
control was explained by Mr. G. H. Humphrey, the
Proprietor and originator of the scheme, as a
matter of banking accommodation : —

"Dependent as we are on loans and the Banks, we
have to maintain a Capitalist front to the world and a

TRADE POLICY: JOINT ACTION 233

Democratic one to the workers. As we are financed by
loans we have to give personal guarantees, and our per-
sonal guarantees have no weight unless we own half the
organization, I have, therefore, given away only one
half of the voting stock of the Company, retaining the
other half which I use as my ballast for my personal
guarantees."

I

This must of course be understood as one man*s
experiment, and not as an illustration of a large
body of experience, and it is an experiment that
is no longer in operation, since John Dawson's,
though highly successful in war-time production,
was unable to finance the readjustment to peace
conditions. It is, however, of great interest as
marking the most definite devolution of an em-
ployer's authority.

Of almost equal interest, and perhaps of greater
importance, was the -joint action on trade policy
that was a by-product of State control during the
war. It is true that trade union and employers'
association representation on bodies charged with
public functions was not quite unknown before the
war; there was a minority of two labor members,
for example, on the Port of London Authority.
State action for war purposes made the practice
of real importance. The State took over, in vari-
ous degrees, the control over the most important
industries in the country; in certain industries,
this control was largely administered — after early

234 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

attempts to do everything by State action — •
through bodies composed in part of representa-
tives of employers and employed. This principle,
it is true, did not extend to shipping ; the National
Maritime Board was a joint body, but its func-
tions were merely conciliatory. The railways were
and are administered under the Board of Trade"
by a Railway Executive Committee of railway
presidents. The National Union of Railwaymen
asked repeatedly for representation on this com-
mittee; the request was denied, but the following
clause was inserted in the 1919 agreement : —

"When the new Ministry of Ways and Communica-
tions is set up it is the intention of the Government to
provide in the organization for and to avail itself fully
of the advantage of assistance, co-operation, and advice
from the workers in the transportation industry."

Negotiations on this point are now (November,
1919) proceeding between the Government and the
Railwaymen. Mr. J. H. Thomas announced at
Bristol on November 16 that the Government had
made an offer to the unions of three seats on the
Railway Executive Committee.

In the other branches of the transport industry,
road transport was administered without labor
representation ; but local consultative committees,
on which the Transport "Workers ' Federation was
represented, exercised certain functions in refer-

TRADE POLICY: JOINT ACTION 235

ence to both dock and canal traffic. The coal in-
dustry was much under State supervision from
the outbreak of the war; by February, 1917, the
Government had assumed complete control. At
that time the Coal Mining Organization Committee,
which included representatives of the Miners
(Smillie, Hartshorn, and Walsh) and the mine-
owners, and which had played an important part
not only in conducting output campaigns but in
suggesting economies of distribution was made
into an Advisory Board to the Coal Controller,
with equal representation from the two sides.
The Miners ' Federation was not satisfied with the
limited and purely advisory powers of this Board,
and at its 1918 Conference passed the following
resolution :—

"In the opinion of this Conference the present form,
of Governmental control of the mines tends to develop
into pure bureaucratic administration, which is in itself
as equally inimical to the interests of the workmen and
the industry as was the uncontrolled form of private
ownership. We, therefore, propose that, pending the
complete nationalization of the mines with joint control
by the State and the workers, the present Joint Ad-
visory Committee of the Coal Controller should be vested
with directive power jointly with the Coal Controller."

In South Wales a Joint Allocation Committee
was set up to meet the problem of distributing or-
ders for the various grades of coal to the different

236 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

collieries in order to bring about uniformity of em-
ployment throughout the coalfield. Mr. Hodges
described this as "a taste of effective control in
the allocation of trade," though Mr. Evan Wil-
liams of the coal-owners insisted that while, **you
gave us valuable information," the scheme itself
* * was not put into operation. ' ' '

In the engineering and allied industries and
particularly the production of munitions, the con-
trol exercised by the State was perhaps most direct
and there was very little devolution of authority
(except to the Munitions Tribunals already men-
tioned). In certain districts, however, notably the
Northeast Coast and the Clyde, local Munitions of
War Committees were set up with seven employ-
ers, seven union representatives and a number of
State nominees. These were directly charged with
the function of accelerating production. Mr. Cole
wrote * of this as a step of great importance : —

"It will go down to history as tlie first definite and
official recognition of the right of the workers to a say
in the management of their own industries. Here for
the first time the nominees of the workers meet those of
the masters on equal terms, to discuss not merely wages,
hours,, or conditions of labor, but the actual business of
production. ' '

The real control exercised by these committees,
however, varied widely with the degree of interest

• Coal Commission Evidence, Questions 23705-23714.

* Labor in War Time, p, 198.

TRADE POLICY: JOINT ACTION 237

shown by the workers in the different locali-
ties.

The most striking examples of joint administra-
tion by employers and employed were the Wool
and Cotton Control Boards. The Government was
the chief consumer of wool during the war. Early
in 1916 it took considerable power under the
Defence of the Realm Act to direct production, and
in the same year bought almost the entire supply
of raw material in order to establish priorities
for war work. In April, 1917, an Advisory Com-
mittee, on which the unions had five members as
against twenty-four representing the employers
and merchants, was set up and iromediately ex-
tended the system of priorities and drastically re-
stricted the hours to be worked by mills employed
in the civilian trade. During August and Septem-
ber, after considerable unrest in the industry, the
Wool Control Board — eleven representatives
of the unions, eleven of the employers, and
eleven of the War Office Contracts Department —
was set up with extensive powers in organizing
the civilian trade and full power to ration raw
material to the various branches of the industry
and to the particular firms engaged. ''Clearly,"
says the Labor Year Book (1919), "the principle
of equal representation of Trade Unions with the
employers on a body possessing such powers
creates a precedent of the greatest possible impor-

238 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

tance, and one which is still strongly resented by
some employers in the industry."

The Cotton Control Board — ^which in its final
form consisted of seven employers and merchants,
seven union leaders, and two nominees of the
Board of Trade — exercised even more important
administrative powers. The problem in the case
of cotton was the shortage of raw material ; many
of the ships that had formerly brought cotton were
either sunk or diverted to other purposes. The
object of control was to regulate the price of the
raw material and to conserve the supply. The
Control Board was set up on June 28, 1917; its
first acts were to regulate purchases by a system
of licenses and to take a complete census of cotton
stocks. It was soon given full powers to fix the
price of the raw material and to allocate it among
the different firms. The latter function was per-
formed by restricting the percentage of spindles
that could be run on other than Government work.
An important extension of the Board's duties
resulted from the effects of the shortage and the
consequent restriction. Some provision had to be
made for those unemployed. The arrangement
made was this : firms were to be allowed to exceed
the specified percentage of spindles on payment
of a levy for all spindles in excess ; this levy be-
came an unemployment fund which was admin-
istered, on agreed principles, wholly by the trade

TRADE POLICY: JOINT ACTION 239

unions. This was discussed in Section IV as an ap-
plication of the principle that unemployment
should be a charge on the industry and as a definite
delegation of responsibility to the trade unions
for administering benefit.

The case of the Cotton Control Board has been
taken — by Mr. Penty, for example, in his Indus-
trial Crisis and the Way Out — as a striking in-
stance of trade union direction of industry. It is
easy to make out the case. Here were a group of
union leaders on a Board which was charged with
the responsibility of meeting the problems of a
great industry in a great emergency and which
was given almost unlimited powers to say what
work should or should not be done and what ma-
chines should or should not be kept running.
These were great and executive powers — certainly
an opportunity for positive control. The best evi-
dence, however, seems to be that, except as regards
the unemployment benefit which they administered
independently and with little friction, the control
exercised by the union leaders was more negative
than positive. They were there to see that no
harm was done to the unions; the constructive
planning was left almost entirely to a few of the
employers and civil servants. This was not be-
cause the union leaders, being in a minority, were
voted down; it was because they attended only
the formal weekly meetings — the real planning

240 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

was done between them. It is true that the employ-
ers at the end of the war hastened to secure the
abolition of the board for fear the union leaders
would through it learn to run the industry ; there
is no evidence, however, that they even thought of
taking their position as an opportunity for learn-
ing control.

Joint action for commercial purposes is then
not unheard of. The Whitley proposals are of
some importance in offering a possibility of widen-
ing the range of subjects. Joint acceptance of
public responsibility for the conduct of industry
was a significant war development. The next sec-
tion will discuss the few trade union attempts at
independent action in these fields.

xvin

TRADE POLICY: WORKERS' DEMANDS

The previous section dealt with joint action on
trade policy — action rarely initiated from the labor
side and carried on for joint purposes. The pres-
ent section deals with attempts by the workers to
manipulate trade policy for their own purposes,
with their independent suggestions for improve-
ment in trade policy, and with their demands for
trade and financial information. The actual in-
stances are less frequent ; the fact that the initia-
tive comes from the workers, however, makes
them of interest for a study of control.

The last section discussed the ** Birmingham
Alliances," a rare instance of trade unions join-
ing with their employers to rig prices. There
are also rare instances of trade unions trying to
rig prices on their own account by limitation of
output, or of trade unions disagreeing with their
employers as to the best means of rigging prices.
The classic illustration of the latter is the cotton
dispute of 1878 described by the Webbs. The own?-
ers announced a ten per cent reduction of wages
to meet a depression due to a glut in the market.
The unions argued that the way to meet a glut in

241

242 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

the market was to stop overproduction, and of-
fered to accept tlie reduction in wages on condition
that the factories should work only four days a
week. * ' One hundred thousand factory workers, ' *
said the Weavers' Manifesto, "are waging war
with their employers as to the best possible way to
remove the glut from an overstocked market, and
at the same time reduce the difficulties arising
from an insufficient supply of raw cotton. To
remedy this state of things the employers propose
a reduction of wages. . . . We contend that a re-
duction in the rate of wages cannot either remove
the glut in the cloth market or assist to tide us
over the difficulty arising from the limited supply
of raw material. ' ' The ten weeks ' strike over eco-
nomic policy finally ended in the complete defeat
of the workers.

The cotton unions have on this and other oc-
casions clainied, unsuccessfully, a right to force
upon the employers their notions of the way to
adjust output to demand in order to maintain
prices and wages. The Miners alone have once or
twice attempted to do the adjusting on their own
account. Two facts may partly explain this. For
a long period of years the coal-owners in certain
districts, notably Northumberland, had agreed to
a limitation of output — ''the limitation of the
vend" — for the purpose of keeping up the price of
coal; of this the workers were, of course, aware

TRADE POLICY: WORKERS' DEMANDS 243

and in Lancashire had even been at times parties
to the agreement. In the second place, the miners'
wages in many districts were governed, either
under formal sliding scale agreement or according
to the general practice of arbitrators, by the sel-
ling price of coal ; manipulation of the selling price
by the owners or dealers was thus felt by the min-
ers to be ''gambling with men's wages." It is not
then surprising that the Miners have in a few
instances insisted that, "supply and demand
should be adjusted rather by diminishing the out-
put than by forcing coal upon unwilling buyers."
In 1892 the Miners saved themselves from a reduc-
tion in wages, threatened on account of the great
surplus stocks of coaP which the coal-owners
could not sell, by arbitrarily taking a week's holi-
day. A similar issue arose just before the out-
break of war in 1914. The Scottish Miners were
threatened with a reduction which would have
brought their wages below the national minimum
agreed on by the Miners' Federation; yet they
were under agreement to submit to arbitration,
and the lowered price of coal, due to overproduc-
tion, would be used as the chief argument against
them. The Scottish union, apparently following
an expedient sometimes practiced in Lanarkshire,
decided to work only four days a week in order to

* It Is very difiScult in 1919 to think back to a time when there
could have oeen " great surplus stocks of coal " in England.

^44 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

reduce the surplus and to force up the price. The
matter was vigorously debated at a conference of
the Miners' Federation of Great Britain. /'When
they were last before the neutral chairman, ' ' said a
Scottish delegate, "one of the grounds put for-
ward for the reduction of 25% was that some of
the collieries were only working two or three days
a week, and because of the glut of coal in the
market prices were going down. The four-days
policy would enable all their men to get an equal
share of work, and would also take in hand the
insane competition amongst the sellers of coal."
The question was argued at length. For the policy
it was urged that: —

"If the employers will not so regulate the working
of the mines as to prevent the overproduction and bring
wages up to a decent living wage, then the workers
themselves are entitled to take the matters into their
own hands."

On the other hand there was a strong feeling
against "the acceptance of the principle of the
policy of restriction." The Conference finally
decided not to approve the four-days policy, but
to support the Scottish Miners in case their wages
fell below the agreed minimum. Within two weeks
the Great War had broken out; and in the "in-
dustrial truce" that followed immediately, and
with the increased demand for coal which was a

TRADE POLICY: WORKERS' DEMANDS 245

more lasting effect of the war, the issue was not
pressed.

These direct attempts to regulate the amount
of production for the sake of wages are unusual
even in the two industries named and practically
unknown outside. There are, however, cases of
suggestions for changes in trade policy less im-
mediately connected with wages. The Miners'
demand that ^* small coal" should be brought to
the surface and used and paid for is perhaps a
border case. The demand begins with wages; it
is supported by arguments of the danger of ''gob
fires ' ' when the coal is stowed in the workings and
of the national waste involved. The 1916 Confer-
ence resolved: —

"That the Miners' Federation of Great Britain be
urged to take immediate steps to bring before the Coal
Control Board the enormous national loss caused by the
practice of stowing small coal in the workings, with a
view of making the necessary arrangements for secur-
ing that all coal produced in the mines should be sent
to the surface."

A long-standing argument of the Miners for na-
tionalization that on the ground of conservation, is
clearly a demand for an improvement in the policy
of the industry: —

"Unless we press for the nationalization of mines at
once there will be nothing but the worst seams left for
the nation to work."

246 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

A very large part of the Miners' case before the
Coal Commission was taken up with the argument
on technical grounds that unification by national-
ization would make possible a number of improve-
ments^—the pooling of privately-owned railway
trucks, for example — in trade policy.

The most conspicuous instance of a trade union
suggesting schemes for the improvement of its
industry is that of the Postal and Telegraph
Clerks' Association. Some years ago its parent
society (United Kingdom Postal Clerks' Associa-
tion) printed a pamphlet containing a scheme for
extending the service by the institution of a postal
banking scheme. Its foreword read : —

"With a view to bringing before the public the pos-
sibilities of the British Postal Service as a means of pro-
viding the business community and the general public
with the facilities for the transaction of business, the
United Kingdom Postal Clerks' Association has been
tabulating evidence and information concerning the
Postal Services of other countries.

This pamphlet outlines the most remarkable feature of
Post Office activity which has taken place during the last
five years, viz., the development of the Post Office Bank-
ing Business for the transmission of moneys, known as
the Postal Cheque and Transfer Service.

The importance of the subject from a business stand-

" These suggestions are listed in two of the first set of reports
issued by the Coal Commission — that of Justice Sankey and three
employers and that of the six labor representatives. Cmd. 87
and 85.

TRADE POLICY: WORKERS' DEMANDS 247

point has impelled the Postal Clerks* Association to
place this matter before the public with a view to direct-
ing attention to Postal affairs, so that the Post Office
Authorities may be induced to improve and develop the
Service on the lines indicated."

With either the details or the merits of the pro-
ject, this inquiry is, of course, not concerned; the
point is that it represents the expenditure of trade
union money and energy in attempting to force
what is believed to be an improvement of the ser-
vice in which its members are engaged. Appar-
ently this intention is still of importance to the
Postal and Telegraph Clerks. A resolution
passed at their 1916 Conference declared : —

"This Conference is convinced that . . . the most
effective work which the Executive Committee can ac-
complish during the period immediately before us will
'be by applying itself to consideration of the problem of
development of the Service, having in mind the needs
of the community, the possibility of increased services
to the community ..." and the betterment of condi-
tions for the staff.

Another resolution passed at the same Confer-
ence shows the direct bearing of this sort of inter-
est in industry on the problem of control : —

"Having in view the possibility of the Association as-
suming in the future more direct and active participa-

248 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

tion in the administration of the Postal Service, this
Conference recommends the organization within the
branches of circles for 'craft' study and discussion.
Members of the Association only to be admitted to such
circles. ' ' ■

The Branch moving the resolution had already
started such a study group. Similarly the Execu-
tive Committee urged the rank and file to educate
themselves to apply the Whitley report and in
turn to use the Whitley scheme as an education in
control : ^ —

** Members should begin to study minutely the con-
ditions of their offices and the history of trade and in-
dustry, so that when the time comes they are prepared
to administer the principle with a statesmanship worthy
of a great trade union."

In more than one union the preaching of the
study of the industry as a step toward control has
been part of recent propaganda by the leaders.*
The fear of just this was a reason for the employ-
ers' objection to the Cotton Control Board already
referred to — the fear that the union leaders would
learn too much about finance,^ perhaps by hearing

• In a speech condemning the Whitley report as oflFering no
real workers' control, I heard one of the ablest of the younger
advocates of control taking this attitude toward the labor sym-
pathizers on the Whitley committee: — don't blame them; they
were trying to provide a training ground.

* One' of thera declared, however that, " you might as well talk
to wooden dummies."

' The cotton union secretaries had long had the reputation of
knowing a great deal about the financial position of their industry.

TRADE POLICY: WORKERS' DEMANDS 249

the merchants and manufacturers accuse each
other of profiteering. The labor side of the Wool
Control Board was more conscious of this pos-
sibility, and several of the leaders regret bitterly
the chance lost by not putting a representative on
the full-time staff of the Board.

This desire for a general knowledge of the work-
ings of industry and finance with a direct eye to
learning control is confined to a very few. The
demand for publicity of profits is a widespread
one. Oh yes, said a trade union leader to me, the
employers will discuss anything with us '' except
perhaps costing amd profits.'^ Here is another
keenly-felt frontier of control. It was touched on
by a Scottish miner in the debate on the Miners'
Four Days in 1914: —

"If any such increase in the cost of production has
taken place, they [the employers] will have to open their
books and prove it, and further, we want to know what
profits have been during these periods on the price ob-
tained. They say they will never open their books to
us and show their profits, as in their opinion we have
nothing to do with profits ; that is a question for them. ' '

By 1919 the coal-owners were in fact opening
their books to show their profits to the Coal Com-
mission.

D. F. Schloss quoted one of them as follows j — ^''We know . .
the j!;eneral rate of profits, depreciation, costs, etc., . . , and
we know that after we have got our wages out of it, and we
leave the balance to the employer, he has nothing to make a great
noise about."

250 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the
ComLmission in this connection, first, because of
the actual profits revealed, second, because of the
Commission's practically unanimous recommenda-
tion in favor of future publicity of profits, and
third, because of its effect in encouraging a similar
demand in other trades. The first result is of no
concern for the present inquiry. The second is
of importance and has been given comparatively
little public attention for the very reason that it
was an agreed recommendation. The Chairman's
report and Sir Arthur Duckham's are on this mat-
ter identical in substance. The latter reads as
follows : —

"It is essential that there should be complete pub-
licity as to the operations and financial results of the
coal industry. The Ministry of Mines should be ex-
pressly charged with the duty of publishing, not less
than once a year, figures showing the cost of getting coal
in each of the districts of the country, and the propor-
tion chargeable to materials, wages, general expenses,
interest, profits, and other general items. ' '

The other five employers do not touch definitely
upon this point in their recommendations, but they
quote with evident approval the even more em-
phatic opinion expressed in the evidence and
scheme submitted by the Mining Association of
Great Britain: —

TRADE POLICY: WORKERS' DEMANDS 251

''The authors [of the coal-owners' project] contend
that want of knowledge with respect to prices, costs and
profits, and the absence of machinery conferring upon
the workers opportunities for obtaining information and
influencing the conditions under which they work have
been to a great extent the cause of the existing discon-
tent.

The authors propose th^t, in future, fluctuations of
the wages of the workers in each mining district, over
and above the minimum rates, should, instead of being
regulated solely as in the past by selling prices, be regu-
lated by reference also to costs and profits in that dis-
trict.

For this purpose, average prices, costs and profits in
each district are to he jointly ascertained, so that the
workers may he able in future to discuss questions of
wages with a complete knowledge of the results of the
industry in that district." (Italics mine.)

On the third point — ^the influence which the great
publicity of the Commission's work has had in
encouraging similar demands in other industries
it is too early to gather much evidence. One ex-
pression of it, from a prominent building trades
official, was something like this : — we '11 never again
accept the plea that they can't afford an advance
until they show us the books !

These trade union demands on the subject of
trade policy are neither many nor of frequent oc-
currence, but the range they cover is significantly
wide. In a few cases the unions have tried to alter

252 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

their employers' trade policy in adjusting output
to demand. In others they have suggested specific
improvements in trade policy. And finally they
have made some claim to be shown the inner
workings of the business direction of industry.

XIX
THE EXTENT OF CONTROL

The attempt has been made in the preceding sec-
tions to indicate the specific sorts of control of in-
dustry now exercised by organized workers in
Great Britain. I know no way of adding these
and making a neat sum. How much control have
the workers got? There is no use in making gen-
eral answers, like ''very little" or "a good deal."
But in weighing and judging the extent of control,
certain distinctions which have been implicit in the
previous discussion are worth making explicit.

'' Agreeable control is better than enforced con-
trol," I heard a Birmingham toolmaker say. "In-
vasion, not admission, should be the trade union-
ist's watchword," said one of the prominent Guild
Socialists. The distinction is of some importance.
Which is better depends on what you want, and on
economy of effort in getting it ; but, from the point
of view of definition, enforced control is control
in a more real sense. There is a significant psycho-
logical difference between "admission" and "in-
vasion, ' ' between control presented to and control
seized by a trade union. The distinction may be

263

254. THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

made clearer by illustration. When ** Bedstead
Smith" organized the first of the ''Birmingham
Alliances ' ' and let the trade unions come in on the
deal, the sort of workers' ''control" over price-
fixing that resulted was a very different thing from
the sort of control that would have resulted, say,
if the "Miners' Four Days" policy in 1914 had
been applied and had raised the price of coal.
Control implies initiative; for that reason, forms
of control entirely initiated from above must be
ruled out unless or until they are shown to involve
workers ' activity as well as acquiescence. On that
ground co-partnership and similar bits of "con-
trol" offered to workers in connection with profit-
sharing schemes have been left out of consider-
ation. This same distinction accounts for the
paradox of a refusal of control pointed out with
such surprise in the chairman's statement of the
Ebbw Vale Steel, Iron, and Coal Co. (July 2,
1919) :—

"After very mature consideration your directors de-
cided to extend an invitation to one of the great trade
unions to nominate one of their number to occupy a
seat on this board. We felt that the presence of a rep-
resentative of labor on this board, with all the privileges,
with all the responsibilities of an ordinary director,
would perhaps give him the opportunity of realizing the
many difficulties which from time to time confront those
men whose duty it is to control the destinies of our great

THE EXTENT OF CONTROL 255

industrial campanies. We felt that in realizing and ap-
preciating our difficulties lie might possibly be able to
take a broader view of the many questions which have
from time to time to be settled between capital and
labor; we felt that the presence of a representative of
labor on this board would have given an opportunity to
myself and to my colleagues to have learned the views
of labor at first hand.

"I regret to say our invitation to labor has been re-
fused. In that I am somewhat surprised and consid-
erably disappointed. If labor seeks to control industry,
then labor should be prepared to serve its apprenticeship
side by side with men who have made it their lifelong
study."

Eeal control of industry cannot be presented
like a Christmas-box.

Certain of the advocates of ''control" push this
distinction even to the point of saying that joint
control cannot be in any sense workers' control.
Mr. J. T. Murphy, the spokesman of the Shop
Stewards' Movement, publishes an attack on the
Whitley proposals with the significant title,
''Compromise or Independence," in which he
says that: —

"A 'joint' committee can only be a committee of em-
ployers and employees formed to prevent any encroach-
ment on the power of the dominant body, in this case
the employers."

But this is surely an overstatement. The Build-
ing Trades Council's committee on "Organized

256 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

Public Service" hardly fits Mr. Murphy's defini-
tion; and it is impossible to imagine Mr. Smillie,
for example, losing his independence by sitting
on a joint body like the Coal Mining Organization
Committee. It is impossible to rule out all forms
of joint control; the test must be whether in the
particular instance of joint control the workers'
side is independently active. Joint control when
the lead is entirely from the employing side — as
in co-partnership and the "Birmingham Alli-
ances"— may be disregarded. But the Whitley
Councils must be studied and judged by their ac-
tions; the classification of each council depends
not on its constitution but on the purely empirical
question whether the chief function of the workers '
side is to be that of junior partnership in petition-
ing for Protection and similar favors from the
Government or whether, as is already the case in
the Building Trades Council, the workers' side is
to play an active part in shaping policy. ''One
point, however, must be made clear," says Mr.
Malcolm Sparkes, the chief founder of that council,
in an article maintaining that the Industrial Coun-
cil Movement is going in the same direction as the
Shop Stewards ' Movement. •' ' In itself the Indus-
trial Council is no solution for the problem of con-
trol. It is, however, an instrument that can pro-
duce the solution." The same test of actual in-
dependence of function applies also to joint bodies

THE EXTENT OF CONTROL 257

exercising state-given powers. This was the basis
of the questions asked in Section XVII about the
Cotton Control Board. So with the various
schemes of voluntary '^devolution of managerial
functions. " The initiative here is clearly from the
top. Mr. Humphrey of John Dawson's makes the
distinction in the pamphlet already cited : —

"There is a likelihood of a great educative movement
amongst the working classes as a result of which they
will take a large measure of control, and their obstruc-
tive employers will wish they had given joint control in
their own works when they had the chance to do it
gracefully. ' '

Until such schemes are actively taken up by the
workers, they amount to nothing in the way of
control, however much they cover on paper. But
when or if they are so taken up, they should not
be ruled out because of their origin; what begins
as a gift may become a right. The line between
"agreeable" and ''enforced" control, or better be-
tween dependent and mdependent control, must
be drawn not on the ground of the origin of con-
trol or even of the extent of control, but solely
by the test of whether or not the workers' side
does actually exert an independent force.

A similar distinction, and one more frequently
drawn, is that between negative and positive con-

258 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

trol. It is a commonplace that the control now
exercised by the workers is mainly negative — that
they may sometimes say *'no," or say that work
must not be done, or changes must not be intro-
duced, except under certain conditions, but they
can very rarely say that this or that must be done.
They are in the position, as Mr. Tawney says, of
''an Opposition that never becomes a Govern-
ment." It is easy to confirm this from the in-
stances given; most of the ''trade union con-
ditions"— of hiring, apprenticeship, demarcation,
and the rest — are clearly negative. It is much
shorter to enumerate the instances of positive con-
trol. In the staffing of shops and in the selection
of foremen, the Stuff Pressers exercise positive
choice. There are other cases of independent ad-
ministration by the workers within sharply limited
fields, for example by the printers' "clicker" in
allocating work and by the miners ' safety inspec-
tors. The workmen directors at Dawson's were
charged with positive functions; certain shop
stewards actually — though not in name — exercised
directive powers during the war. And finally there
are the "Insistences on Changes in Technique"
by the Miners' output committees and others,
which were emphasized because of the great cur-
rent significance of this distinction. Positive con-
trol covers then only a very small proportion of
the cases even of that independent control defined

THE EXTENT OF CONTROL 259

in the preceding paragraph. On the other hand,
a number of the newer demands are put forward
with just this sort of control in mind. The Clyde
committee, whose proposals were quoted in Section
XV, wanted the right to say not under what con-
ditions machinery might be introdileed but actually
where it should be introduced. The object of the
scheme of collective contract put forward is to
' * take over a whole province ' ' of industrial direc-
tion from the employers. In fact the essence of
the new demand of labor, as was stated by Mr.
Henry Clay in the Observer, is for ''participation
in the direction and not merely in the regulation
of industry." Insistence on this distinction* does
not imply that regulation and negative control are
not real control or that they are not of great im-
portance. The standard of foremanship, for ex-
ample, is maintained almost entirely by the highly
negative process of insurgence. And the right to
say yes or no shades very easily into the right to
say which or what. But the distinction is worth
emphasizing, as indicating the new Frontier of
Control — over which the conscious struggle is
marked on the one hand by Mr. Frank Hodges'
demand on behalf of the workers for ''the daily
exercise of directive ability" and on the other by
Lord Gainford's testimony before the Coal Com-
mission : —

260 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

"I am authorized to say on behalf of the Mining
Association that if owners are not to be left complete
executive control they will decline to accept the respon-
sibility of carrying on the industry."

A third distinction — and one that I have no-
where seen definitely stated — is that between what
might be called old craft or customary control on
the one hand and conscious or contagious control
on the other. This is based not on the greater or
less degree of ''reality" of control exercised but
on the nature and policy of the union exercising
it. It is a distinction of no importance if the ob-
ject of inquiry is merely the static one of present-
ing the sum of instances of control. But for any
study in terms of process, for any study that pre-
tends to estimate moving tendencies, it seems to
me of the highest importance. The more striking
instances of control already mentioned fall quite
clearly into two main classes: — on the one hand
control long exercised as a customary right by con-
servative, exclusive, and usually small unions in
old skilled crafts, fighting if at all only to resist
' ' encroachments ' ' on their ancient privileges ; and
on the other hand control newly and consciously
won by aggressive, propagandist, usually indus-
trial, unions in the great organized industries,
fighting not to resist encroachments but to make
them. The Stuff Pressers, the Hand Papermakers,

THE EXTENT OF CONTROL 261

the Glass Bottle Makers,^ the Calico Printers and,
less typically, the Compositors are instances of
the former class of unions. The Miners and the
Railwaymen are the most highly-developed ex-
amples of the latter. Cases of these two sorts of
control, or of the first sort and of the demand for
the second, have been set down side by side in
almost every section: — full control over employ-
ment exercised by the Stuff Pressers and full con-
trol over employment demanded by certain indus-
trial unionists among the Engineers; sharing of
work long practised by the Yorkshire Glass Bottle
Makers and rationing of employment demanded by
the Clyde Engineers ; the Hand Papermakers long
guaranteed ''six days' custom" and the Railway-
men this year securing a guaranteed weekly wage ;
the Stuff Pressers choosing their own foremen and
the activists among Engineers, Miners, Railway-
men, and Postal Workers pushing for the right;
Compositors and Miners alike enforcing a stand-
ard of foremanship and preventing ** policing";
the printers' clicker allocating work by long cus-
tom and certain Tramwaymen securing it as a
new right; co-operative work in the Cornish tin
mines and collective contract a new demand of
Glasgow engineers; and so on. The difference
then is not primarily in the actual bits of control
exercised, nor is it merely a matter of the date

* See above, p. 168. . . •

262 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

of acquisition of power. If the latter difference
did not carry with it a totally different attitude of
mind and if, for example, an official of the Stuff
Pressers toured the country with Mr. Frank
Hodges of the Miners and seconded the latter 's
speeches on behalf of *' Workers' Control" by
stating that his union had had some workers ' con-
trol and had found it good, the distinction might
very well be ignored. But in point of fact, nothing
like this does or could happen. In the first place,
the old crafts have no theories of the value of con-
trol for control's sake. Just for this reason the
Stuff Pressers are giving up their right to elect
foremen almost without protest, since the change
is going on with no immediate practical loss.
Similarly the old crafts are thoroughly conserva-
tive; they are engaged in defending "established
expectations" ^ just as definitely as the advocates

* The old craft type of mind is best described on p. 671 of
Industrial Democracy : — " The Doctrine of Vested Interests. . . .
is naturally strongest in the remnants of the time-honored ancient
handicrafts. Those who have troubled to explore the nooks and
crannies of the industrial world, which have hitherto escaped the
full intensity of the commercial struggle, will have found in them
a peculiar type of Trade Union character. Wherever the Doc-
trine of Vested Interests is still maintained by the workmen, and
admitted by the employers — where, that is to say, the conditions
of employment are consciously based, not on the competitive
battle but on the established expectations of the different classes
— we find an unusual prevalence, among the rank and file, of what
we may call the 'gentle' nature — that conjunction of quiet dig-
nity, grave courtesy, and consideration of other people's rights
and feelings, which is usually connected with old family and long-
established position. But this type of character becomes every
day rarer in the Trade Union world." No contract could be
sharper than that between this " gentleness " and the aggressive-

THE EXTENT OF CONTROL 263

of the newer control are in the broad sense revolu-
tionary and out to attack ''established expecta-
tions. ' ' The father of a compositors ' chapel talks
of the London * ' Scale ' ' with much the same rever-
ence that a thoroughgoing engineers ' shop steward
saves for the Social Revolution. And as a natural
corollary, the old crafts are exclusive and aristo-
cratic and play little part in the labor movement ;
the advocates of the newer control are widely
propagandist. The Stuff Pressers keep themselves
to themselves and hug their monopoly ; the authors
of the Miners' Next Step are propagandists for
control on the expressed ground that :—

* * We cannot get rid of employers and slave-driving in
the mining industry, until all other industries have
organized for and progressed towards the same objec-
tive. Their rate of progress conditions ours ; all we can
do is to set an example and the pace. ' *

This difference in intention clearly makes a
difference in results. Nobody supposes that the
Railwaymen demanded a guaranteed week because
the Hand Papermakers had one ; on the other hand,

ness of the modern advocate of the Doctrine of Workers' Control.
The latter temper at its extreme may be indicated by a few sen-
tences from one of J. T. Murphy's pamphlets: — "They [the em-
ployers] struggled through the centuries to obtain their power.
We also of the working-class have come through the long years
of strife and have suffered their batterings and their spite. We
do not squeal. Struggle is the law of life. As we see they rose
on the backs of our class we see and feel now the gathering
power of the labor hosts."

264 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

the publicity of profits which the Miners secured
through the Coal Conunission almost immediately
becomes a demand in other trades. This distinc-
tion is of great importance in estimating the po-
tential significance of these forms of workers ' con-
trol. Old craft control is traditional and clings on
but does not spread. On the other hand, news of
each ''invasion" made by the theorists and propa-
gandists of the newer control is carried to other
trades and made the basis of agitation there. It
is for this reason that the word ''contagious"
seems a significant one for describing this newer
and more conscious control. The two things are
not the same: — old craft control almost neces-
sarily implies small groups of skilled workers ; the
advocates of contagious control are for the most
part either members of industrial unions or strong
advocates of industrial unionism; the temper of
the old crafts is monopolistic and conservative;
that of the latter, propagandist and revolutionary.
Undoubtedly there is some slight degree of cross-
influence, just as the various attempts at inde-
pendent associations of producers have no doubt
had some influence on the present and very differ-
ent demand for control. The printing unions are
by no means isolated from the general tendencies
of the labor movement,^ and of course there are

• The printing unions were among the first to oiFer their help
to the Railwaymen during the recent strilce.

THE EXTENT OF CONTROL 265

many unions of various sorts between the two
extreme types indicated here. But the types are
widely and fundamentally different, and it seems
to me almost futile to argue from the experience
of one to the other: — equally futile, for example,
to argue that direct election of foremen would be
a good thing for all industry because it worked
for a long time with the Stuff Pressers, or to argue
that the right to elect foremen is proved of no
use to other workmen because the Stuff Pressers
are giving it up without protest. And for the
purpose of attempting to forecast future develop-
ments, the distinction is of the highest importance.
It raises the entire question of the historical rela-
tion between the type of industrial technique and
the type of industrial government. You cannot
base a theory of modern industry on the tin mines
of Cornwall. Old craft control is a survival from
an earlier technology and is clearly dying out with
the industrial conditions that made it possible.
Contagious control is a demand made in view of
the newer industrial technique ; the judgment as to
whether or not it is to grow must be made in-
dependently of the decay of the other.

The answer to the question, How much controls
depends, then, on whether or not the question it-
self is qualified in any of the three senses indicated
above. If it is not qualified, the nearest answer

266 THE FRONTIER OF CONTROL

that can be given is : — all the control indicated in
the earlier sections and whatever more may be
thought of under co-partnership or other devices
of ''industrial peace." K the question is how
much independent control? — and this seems to me
the broadest sense in which the term ''control'*
can be used with any significance — the few cases
mentioned in which the initiative lies entirely with
the employers must be ruled out, and all instances
of joint control must be narrowly examined to see
whether they involve workers' activity or merely
workers' acquiescence. If the question is how
much positive control? — and this question is of
importance as marking the newest Frontier of
Control — the answer can be given in a very few
instances, — of which the staffing of shops and
choice of foremen by the Stuff Pressers, the work
of the labor-directors at Dawson's, and the in-
sistences by a few Miners' output committees on
specific improvements in management, are the
most conspicuous. If the question is how much
contagious control? — and this question is import-
ant for any guesses about the future — ^nearly half
the cases mentioned, including some of the more
striking forms of positive control and the greater
part of the negative control covered by the phrase
"the right to a trade," must be ruled out as hav-
ing little bearing on the moving tendencies in the
great industry.

NOTE ON SOURCES

The following is a brief list of the more valuable
sources of material on workers' control — of those, that
is, that can be obtained outside the Labour Research
Department or Scotland Yard.

I. BRITISH GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS.

(H. M. Stationery Office, Imperial Hoiise, Kingsway, London

W. C. 2.)
Report on Collective Agreements. 1910, Cd. 5,366.

The most comprehensive cross-section picture of the
extent and variety of trade union agreements.
Annual Reports on Strikes and Lockouts. 1910, Cd. 5,850.
•1911, Cd. 6,472. 1912, Cd. 7,089. 1913, Cd. 7,658.

A valuable indication of the magnitude and, less ac-
curately, the causes of strikes. The sections on the specific
issues of strikes are especially suggestive. The classifica-
tion of causes is, however, inconvenient for the purposes
of the student of control.
Report of the Commissioners on Industrial Unrest. 1917.
The section on South Wales discusses the demand for
control.

Works Committees. Ministry of Labour. Industrial Report
No. 2. (Reprinted in America by the Bureau of Industrial
Research, New York.)

The most useful single official document on workers'
control. Ably written and packed' with invaluable factual
material. Further material is being collected for a second
edition.

The Whitley Report. Ministry of Labour. Industrial Re-
port No. 1.

Industrial Councils. Ministry of Labour. Industrial Report
No. 4.

Sample provisions from the constitutions of Whitley
Councils.

Recommendations of the Provisional Joint Committee of the
Industrial Conference. 1919, Cmd. 139.

A somewhat startling indication of the things on which
British employers and workers agree.

267

268 NOTES

Coal Industry Commission. Interim Reports. 1919, Cmd.
84, 85, 86.

Coal Industry Commission. Reports of Second Stage. 1919,
Cmd. 210.

The famous " Sankey Report " recommending nation-
alization of the mines with a considerable measure of
workers' control.

Coal Industry Commission. Minutes of Evidence. Cmd. 359,
360.

The record of a great public clinic in the economics and
psychology of modern industry. Control is a leading
theme throughout. A great mine of valuable material on
this and other subjects that has not yet been worked over
by students.

II. SOURCE MATERIALS ON WORKERS' CONTROL.
A. The Peopaganda of " Complete Contbol. "

The Miners' Next Step. Unofficial Reform Committee.
Tonypandy, South Wales. 1912.

Industrial Democracy for Miners. A Plan for the Demo-
cratic Control of the Mining Industry. The Industrial
Committee of the South Wales Socialist Society,
Forth, Rhondda Valley, South Wales, 1919.

The contrast between these two pamphlets, the work
of the same group of rank-and-file extremists, is a
striking indication of the increasing hopefulness with
which the claim for control is urged. The Miners'
Next Step is bitter and purely destructive, advocating
the irritation strike, and is still publicly referred to
with bated breath as the type of all that is criminal in
syndicalism. Its sequel is hopeful and entirely con-
cerned with constructive, though equally " impossi-
bilist," plans of organizing control.

J. T. Murphy. The Workers' Committee. Sheffield
Workers' Committee, 56 Rushdale Road, Meersbrook,
Sheffield. 1918.

By the chief spokesman for the Shop Stewards Move-
ment. Claimed a sale of 30,000 copies up to May, 1919.

J. T. Murphy. Compromise or Independence? An Ex-
animation of the Whitley Report. Sheffield Workers'
Committee.

W. Gallecher and J. Paton. Towards Industrial De-
mocrccj/; A Mem,ora/ndum on Workshop Control.
Trades and Labour Coimcil, Paisley, Scotland. 1917.

A scheme of " collective contract " devised by two of
the Clyde shop stewards. Taken up in the propaganda
of the National Guild League.

NOTES 269

B. The Miners' Case fob Contbol.

R. Page Arnot. Facts from the Coal Commission and
Further Facts from the Coal Commission. Miners'
Federation, Russell Square, London. 1919.

A skillful abridgement of the most telling evidence
for the Miners' case. The second pamphlet contains the
text of the Miners' Bill for Nationalization.

Frank Hodges. The Nationalisation of the Mines. Par-
sons. London. 1920.

By the Secretary of the Miners' Federation, who of
all prominent labor leaders has most consistently
thought of himself as a student of the control problem.

C. " Joint Control " in the Building Trades.
Organized Public Service in the Building Industry. The

Industrial Council for the Building Industry. 48 Bed-
ford Square, London. 1919.

The far-reaching " Foster Report " presented by a
sub-committee of the Buildijig Trades Parliament.
Thos. Foster. Masters cmd Men. Headley. London.

Mr. Foster is a prominent building trades employer,
a Guild Socialist, and chairmtui of the committee that
drafted the " Foster Report."
History of the Building Trades Parliament. Garton
Foundation. London. 1919.

First-hand. Somewhat sentimental.

D. Employers' Experiments with Control.

C. G. Renold. Workshop Committees. Suggested Lines
of Development. Hans Renold, Ltd., Manchester. 1917.
(Reprinted in America by the Survey.)

Mr. Renold is a Cornell graduate and the managing
director of a highly successful and somewhat "Ameri-
canized " chain factory outside of Manchester.

Democratic Control the Key to Industrial Progress. John
Dawson, Ltd., Newcastle-on-Tyne. 1919.

An account of the boldest attempt on the part of an
employer (Mr. G. H. Humphreys) to give control to
the workers. The firm flourished during the war but
failed to survive the peace.

E. An Engineer's Counterblast Against Control, Alex.

Richardson. The Man-Power of the Nation. Reprinted
from Engineering, 35 Bedford St., Strand, London.
1916.

III. BOOKS ON BRITISH TRADE UNIONISM.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb. History of Trade Unionism,
Longmans, Green. London, New York. 1894.

270 NOTES

Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Industrial Democracy. Long-
mans, Green. London, New York. 1897.

The two great classics of trade unionism. I have drawn
heavily on their material throughout, perhaps most ob-
viously in the earlier part of Section IV and in Section V.
It is interesting to note, however, that their material is
arranged without specific reference to the control problem.
The Doctrine of Workers' Control had not yet been in-
vented.
/ Sidney Webb. The Restoration of Trade Union Conditions.
Huebsch. 1917.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The History of Trade Unionism.
Longmans, Green. London, New York. 1920.
A new edition, revised and brought up to date.

G. D. H. Cole. An Introdtwtion to Trade Unionism. Bell.
London. 1918.

The best brief statement of current trade union prob-
lems. Valuable statistical appendices on trade union
membership.

G. D. H. Cole. Labour in War Time. Bell. London. 1915.

G. D. H. Cole and R. Page Arnot. Trade Unionism on the
Railways. Allen and IJnwin. London. 1917.

G. D. H. Cole. The World of Labour. Bell. London. 1915.
American students should not judge this by its chapter
on American Labor, which is not a fair sample.

G. D. H. Cole. Self-Government in Industry. Bell. London.
1917.

G. D. H. Cole. Labour in the Commonwealth. Headley.
London. 1919.

Mr. Cole's work is almost as indispensable to the study
of current trade unionism as is that of the Webbs for the
earlier period. The last two books are less concerned with
trade unionism as it is than with trade unionism as a
Guild Socialist would like to make it, but they also contain
information not accessible elsewhere. All the books are
written with the control problem in the very forefront.

Labour Year Book, 1916. Labour Party, 33 Eccleston Square,
London.

Labour Year Book, 1910. Labour Party, London.

Useful catalogues of and by the labor movement.

The Industrial Situation After the War. Garton Foundation.
London. 1918, 1919.

IV. BOOKS ON SPECIAL PROBLEMS.
A. Unemployment.

W. H. Beveridge. Unemployment: A Problem of In-
dustry. Longmans. London. 1910.

NOTES 271

R. Williams. The First Year's Working of the Liverpool
Docks Scheme. London. 1914.

B. Methods of Payment.

D. F. Schloss. Methods of Industrial Remuneration.
Williams and Newgate. London. 1892, 1894, 1898.

G. D. H. Cole. The Payment of Wages. Allen and
Unwin. London. 1918.

V. AMERICAN BOOKS ON BRITISH LABOR.

Paul U. Kellogg and Arthur Gleason. British Labor and
the War. Boni and Liveright. New York. 1919.

Arthur Gleason. What the Workers Want. Harcourt,
Brace and Howe. New York. 1920.

Mr. Gleason is by far the best informed American
journalist on British Labor. The earlier book is mainly
concerned with political questions, but Part VI and a
number of the appendices are useful in the present con-
nection. The latter book makes industry its main busi-
ness and contains very valuable material. The first-
hand description of the human side of the Coal Com-
mission, and the statements secured from the leaders
of the Miners and the Shop Stewards, are especially
useful.

INDEX

"Abnormal places," 167
Absentee Committees, 149
Absenteeism, 209
Agreement, Bradford Dyers'
Association, 68, 80, 118;
Brooklands, 166; Engineer-
ing Trades, 57; Leek Silk
Weavers', 187; Linotype Op-
erators', 188; Liverpool
Dockers', 58; Oldham, 224-
225; Pottery, 58; Scottish
Bookbinders', 188, Sliding
Scale, 243; Steel Dressers',
61; "Treasury," 171, 194-197
Agreements, collective, 56-58
Allocation of Work, 58, 61, 155-

156, 190
Amalgamated Society of En-
gineers, 21, 98-99,
" Amicable discipline," 35
Apprentices, limitation of, 58
Apprenticeship, 21, 92-98, 181;
Britannia Metal Smiths,
rules of, 95
Authority, of Employers, 56-57 ;
opposition to, 30-31

Barnes, George, 99

Barr and Stroud's, 218

Bell, Robert, 59

Beveridge, W. H., 83

Bevin, Ernest, 84

Birmingham Alliances, 241-242

Birmingham brass trades' grad-
ing system, 165

Bowley, Professor, 75-76, 86

Bradford Dyers' Association
Agreement, 1914, 68, 80, 118;
payment system of, 172-173

Bradshaw, Secretary, on build-
ing-trades labor supply, 101

" Brains Committee," 219

Bramwell, Hugh, testimony of,

106, 212-214
British Westinghouse Co., 220
Brooklands Agreement, 166
Building Trades Parliament,

8ee under Joint Industrial

Council

Ca'canny policy, 172, 178

Cadbury's, 218, 219

Cannan, Edwin, testimony of,
28-29

Cecil, Lord Robert, quoted, 28

Central Labor College, 5

Clay, Henry, 27, 259

Cleveland Rules, the, 148-149

Clyde Dilution Scheme, 10, 197-
201

Clyde Shop Steward's case, 32

Clyde Workers' Committee, 8,
259

Coal Commission, 1, 46, 51, cund
see under Miners

Coal Miners, see under Miners

Cole, G. D. H., 6, 161-162, 164,
168, 236

Collective Agreements, 56-58

Collective bargaining, 53, 62,
165, 166, 168

Collective Contract payment,
173

Compulsory Unionism, 128

Conciliation Boards, 14, 224-
226

Control, " agreeable," 253 ; a
political word, 36-38; "con-
tagious," 266 ; " complete ex-
ecutive," 51-52; demand for,
3-50; degree of^ 54-55; Derby-
shire Miners and, 44; extent
of, 253-266; favored by
Trade Unionists, 17, 18;

273

274

INDEX

Frontier of, 56-71; Guild So-
cialists and, 5-6; independ-
ent, 257, 266; irksomeness of
present system of, 35; Marx-
ian Industrial Unionists and,
5; Miners' Federation and,
12; National Union of Rail-
Avaymen and, 13-14; negative,
202, 217, 257; Old Craft,
264-265; over choice of fore-
men, 120 ; political factors of,
38; positive, 257, 264, 266;
resentment against, 30-35 ;
striking instances of, 260-261 ;
State, 233; technical factors
of, 39; wage element dom-
inant factor in, 21; workers',
4 et seq., 56.
Co-operative work, 173-175
Cotton Control Board, 237-239,
248; policy concerning im-
employment, 80-81
Craftsmanship, 39-42

Dawson's, John, 231-233, 258

De-casualization Policy, 83

Defence of the Realm Act, 237

Demand for control, 1-50; or-
ganized demand, 4-18; by
propagandist bodies, 5-7 ;
shop stewards, 7-11; trade
unions, 11-18; unorganized
demand, 18-50

Demarcation issue, 99-100, 181

Denny's, Wm., 218

Dilution, 100-03, 181-182, 189;
Clyde scheme of, 10, 197-201

Direct Representation from
Workshops, 9

Discipline and management, 61-
62

Duckham, Sir Arthur, 250

Education in control, 248
Employers, authority of, 56,

60; limitation on, 63, 77;

policy relative to foremen,

129-132
Employment, 63 et seq.; joint

control cf , 68 ; " rationing,"

73; regularizing, 82-85; re-

strictions on, 92 et seq.;
imion membership a condi-
tion of, 64-66

Engineering and Shipbuilding
Draughtsmen, 70

Engineering Trades Agreement,
1898, 57

Factory Act regulations, 154

Fines, 210

Foremanship, standard of, 135-
145

Foremen, choice of, 117-125
National Industrial Confer
ence report on, 132-133
organization of, 126-134
separate unions for, 130
workers' choice of, 120-121,
135

Foremen's Benefit Society, 131,
133

" Forty-hour Movement," 76

Foster Report, 6, 25, 86-91,
229-230

Foster, Thomas, 86

Gainford, Lord, 155, 259-260

Gallacher-Paton memorandum,
10, 70-71, 123, 174

Garton Foundation, report of,
19

Gaunt's, Reuben, 108

Glasgow Trades Union Con-
gress, 15-18

Gleasdn, Arthur, 41

Guaranteed Time, 78-79, 91

Guild Socialists, 5, 122

Hamilton, Lord Claud, 59
Hodges, Frank, 12, 22, 23, 36,

164, 206-207, 212-213, 259
Humphrey, G. H., 232

Improvements, insistence on,
202-216; miners' demand for,
204-215

Industrial Crista cmd the Way
Out, 239

Industrial Democracy, 91

"Industrial True*," 7

Industrial Unionists, and con-

INDEX

275

tagious control, 264; Marx-
ian, 5; shop stewards, 9

Industry, workers' control of,
15-18; joint control of, 224-
240

Interests in industry, worker's,
19-50; what he gets, 20-25;
what it's for, 25-27 ; how he's
treated, 27-38; what he does,
38-50

Inventions, 218-219

Irritation strike, 179

Joint action, see under Trade
policy

Joint control and price fixing,
169-171

Joint discipline, 147-150

Joint Industrial Council, for
the Building Industry, 88,
113, 224, 227-228, 230; for
the Silk Industry, 227-228

Juvenile Employment Commit-
tee, 97

Labor Party, 157

Labor Unions, attitude toward
innovations, 186-191; see also
under Trade Unions and sep-
arate titles

Liverpool Docks Scheme, First
Year's Working of, 79

Lloyd George, David, 60, 193

London Society of Compositors,
67; report of, 97

Machine industry, 39; produc-
tion, 102

Managerial functions, 146-160;
allocation of work, 155-156;
measurement of results, 156-
159; safety of workers, 150,
154; wartime regulations,
147-149

Mann, Tom, 16, 76

Man Potcer Of the Nation, the,
29-30

Marxian Industrial Unionists,
6

Measurement of results, quan-
tity, 157; quality, 158-159

Mining Association of Great
Britain, scheme of, 250-251

Miners' Federation, of Great

Britain, 1, 12-13, 42, 151-152,

154, 163-164, 192, 208, 209,

235, 244-245; of South

Wales, 6, 152-156, 212-214,

235-236
" Miners' Four Days " policy,

254
Miners' Minimum Wage Act,

137, 167
Miners' Next Step, 105, 123,

144, 183, 263
Miners, complaints of, 205-206;

improvements demanded by,

204-215
Miners' Nationalization Bill,

12-13
Ministry of Labor's Report on

Works Committees, 40, 85,

108, 122, 140-141
Muir, John, 193
Munitions of War Act, 147-150
Murphy, J. T., 100, 102, 182,

265

National Guilds League, 6

National Industrial Conference,
132

Nationalization and Joint Con-
trol, 26; miners' bill for, 6,
12, 13

National Union of Railway-
men, 2-6, 4-5; policy of, 13-
14, 42, 61, 78

Northumberland miners, 49, 50

Officialism, revolt against, 8
Oldham agreement, 224-225
Output Committees, 149
Output, 210; restriction of,

177-185
Overtime, Union restrictions

against, 74-75

Payment, and control, 164-165;
collective, 163, 170-173; by
results, 165; Bradford's
Dyers' Association's system,
172-173; for work in abnor-
mal places. 167; methods of,
161-176; South Wales Col-

276

INDEX

liery Agreement for, 167;
Woolen Trades' plan for,
167
Personal freedom, 34
Piece work, 162-163, 205;
Bradford Dyers' Associa-
tion's system of, 172-173;
Phoenix Dynamo Company's
objections to, 170; Wood-
working Trades opposed to,
162
Phoenix Dynamo Co., 170-171
Pitfalls of the Promoted, the,

29 30
" Policing," 31, 137, 261
"Politics of industry," 176
Poor Law Commission Eeport,

86
Postal and Telegraph Clerks,

15, 112
Post Office Workers, 46
Power Loom Overlookers, 95
Premium bonus, 162-163
Production, regulation of, 243-

245
Promotion, 111-116; Federation
of Weavers' rules for, 114;
Joint Industrial Council's
rules for, 112-113; Seniority
rule for, 112; the workers'
prerogative, 115
Publicity of profits, 249-251

"Rank and File Movement," 8

Rate fixing, 168-171

Redmayne, Sir Richard, testi-
mony of, 205-206

Renold's, Hans, 120-121

Restriction and restrictions,
176-185

Richardson, Alexander, 131

Rowntree's, 121

"Sack," the right to, 102 et

seq.
Safety, 150-154; strikes, 152-

154
Sankey, Justice, quoted, 46
Sankey Report, 13, 222
Schloss, D. F., 36, 110, 125, 161-

162, 218

Scottish Master Tailors' state-
ment, 73-74

Sharing of work, 73-74

Sheffield Workers* Committee, 9

Shop Committees and their du-
ties, 200-201

Shop Stewards' Manual, 8-9,
140; movement, 7, 9-11, 255

Short time, 73-77

Sliding Scale, 243

Smillie, Robert, 154, 206, 215

Smith, Herbert, 24, 206

Socialism, fcitate, 25-27

Socialist Labor Party, 5

Sparkes, Malcolm, 227, 256

Specialization, 182, 183

Stay-in strike, 178-179

Steel Dressers' Agreement, 61

Stockholm International Labor
Conference, 25

Straker, William, quoted, 3, 22,
27, 38, 221 ; testimony before
Coal Commission, 33, 47

Strikes, against objectionable
promotions, 114; against ob-
jectionable supervision, 135-
137; against use of machin-
ery, 184; because of a woman
shop steward, 184; for rein-
statement of operatives, 106-
107, 109; for safety, 152;
Glasgow Dockers', 128; Iron
Founders', 204

Stuff Pressers' Society, 69, 94,
117, 172, 263, 265

" Suggestion Boxes," 218

Suggestions, right to make, 43-
46

Syndicalism, 4

Tawney, R. H., 135, 258

Technique, consultation over
changes, 186-201 ; insistence
on improvements, 202-216;
restriction and restrictions,
176-185; suggestions and in-
ventions, 217-222

Thomas, J. H., 60

Thompson, William, 72

Trade Policy, joint action re-
garding, 223-240; Joint In-

INDEX

277

dustrial Councils, 226-227 ;
Oldham Agreement, 224-225;
publicity of profits, 249-251 ;
scheme of Postal Telegraph
Clerks' Association, 223-240;
workers' demands, 241-252

Trade, the right to a, 92-103

Trades Union Congress, Glas-
gow, 1919, 15-16, 18

Trade Union movement, 36

Trade Unions, and overtime, 14-
75; and short time, 75-77; as
employment agencies, 66; at-
titude toward promotions,
111; guaranteed time, 78-79;

• membership of, 92-93; policy
regarding foremen, 126-129,
142

Treasury Agreement, the, 171,
194-197

"Tuppenny Strike," 8

Turner, Ben, 47-48

Unemployment, 72 et seq.; a
charge on the industry, 86
a matter of trade policy, 223
fear of restricts output, 87
prevention of, 86-91; schemes
for lessening, 80-86; security
against, 23
Unionized industry, 64-66
Unions as employment agencies,
66-70

Victimization, 104, 107-108

Wages, 20; and hours, 20-23,

53; collective contract, 173-
174; collective payment, 171-
173; methods of payment,
161 et acq.; piece work, 162-
173

" Wage Slavery," 38

Weavers' Manifesto, 242

Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 36,
86, 91, 93, 112, 157, 203

Wedgwood's, 43

Whitehead Torpedo Works, 147

Whitley Councils, 5-6, 154, 226,
240; report of, 113-114, 192,
221, 248

Williams, R., 79

Woods, Frank, 97-98

Wool Control Board, 237, 249

Women labor, 102

Work, equalization of, 73-74

Workers, grievances of, 140-
142; interests in industry,
19-20, 38; methods of pay-
ment of, 161 et seq.; objec-
tion to being watched, 137-
138; resentment of, 29-35;
safety of, 150-154; sensitive-
ness of, 32; servility of, 33;
treatment of, 27-29

Workers' Control, see under
Control

Working Shedulcs, 156

Workmanship, 46-49; collective,
43

Works' Council, 231-233

Yorkshire Glass Bottle Work-
ers, 74

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