136 Trade Union Struchire
other hand, the results prove to be disadvantageous, the dissentients will themselves become the dominant force. In either case no permanent cleavage is caused. fBut if the difference of opinion between the majority and the minority arises from a real divergence of sectional interests, and is therefore fortified by the event, any attempt on the part of the majority to force its will on the minority will, in a voluntary federation, lead to secession. J
^^.JfTKus, we are led insensibly to a whole theory of " pro- ' ^ggstional representation" in federal constitutions. In a homo- geneous association, where no important divergence of actual interest can exist,' the supreme governing authority can safely be elected, and fundamental issues can safely be decided, by mere counting of heads. Such an association will naturally adopt a representative systeni based on universal suffrage and equat electoral districts. /But when in any federal body" we have a combination of sections of unequal numerical strength, having different interests, decisions cannot safely be left to representatives elected or voting according to the' numerical membership of the constituent bodies. For this, in effect, would often mean giving a decisive voice to the members of the largest section, or to those of the two or three larger sections, without the smaller sections having any effective voting influence on the resultLj Any such arrange- ment seldom fails to produce cleavage and eventual secession, as the members of the dominant sections naturally vote for their own interest. \^ It is therefore pref erable, as a means of se curing the permanence of the federatio r i, tH^*' tV rTr ° ™n- ta tion of the constituent bodies should noJi J'p pvartly pmp nr- tion ate to their respective membersh ip s. Jm ^^ ^ representative system of a federation should, in fact, nice its finances, vary with the degree to which the interests of the constituent bodies are really identical. Wherever interests are divergent, the scale must at any rate be so arranged that no one con- stituent, however large, can outvote the remainder ; and, indeed, so that no two or three of the larger constituents could, by mutual agreerhent, swamp all t^eir colleagues/ If
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for instance, it is proposed to federate all the national unions in the engineering trade, it would be unwise for the Amalga- mated Society of Engineers to claim proportional represen- tation for its 87,000 members, mainly fitters and turners, as compared with the 10,000 pattern-makers, smiths, and machine -workers divided among three sectional societies. And when a federation includes a large number of very" different constituents, and exists for common purposes so limited as to bear only a small proportion to the particular interests of the several sections, it may be desirable frankly to give up all idea of representation according to member- ship, and to accord to each constituent an equal voice . Hence the founders of the Federation of the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades exercised, in our opinion, a wise discretion when they accorded to the 9000 members of the Operative Plumbers' Society exactly the same representation and voting power as is enjoyed by the 41,000 members of the United Society of Boilermakers, or by the 40^00 members of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters. \K federal body« of this kind, formed only for certain definite purposes, and composed of unions with distinct and sometimes divergent interests, stands at the opposite end of the scale from Jhe homogeneous " amalgamated " societyJ^-'irEe representatives of the constituent bodies meet for the composing of mutual differences and the discovery of common interests. They resemble, in fact, ambassadors who convey the desires of their respective sovereign states, contribute their special knowledge to the common council, but are unable to promise obedience to the federal decision, unless it commends itself as a suit- able compromise, or carries with it the weight of an almost unanimous consensus of opinion.^
The problem of finding a stable unit of government and of determining the relation between superior and subordinate authorities seems, therefore, to be in a fair way of solution
1 We revert to these considerations when, in describing the Trade Union machinery for political action, we come to deal with such federations as th« Trade Union Congress and the local Trades Councils.
VOL. I F 2
13S Trade Union Structure
in the Trade Union world. With the ever - increasing mobility of labor and extension of industry, the local trade club has had to give place to a combination of national extent. So long as the craft or occupation is fairly uniform from one end of the kingdom to the other, the geographical boundaries of the autonomous state must, in the Trade Union world, ultimately coincide with those of the nation itself. We have seen, too, how inevitably the growth of national Trade Unions involves, for strategic, and what may be called military reasons, the reduction of local autonomy to a minimum, and the complete centralisation of all financial, and therefore of all executive government at the national headquarters. This tendency is strengthened by economic considerati^s which we shall develop in a subsequent chapter. Of the Trade Union is to have any success in I its main function of improving the circumstances of its i members' employment, it must build up a dyke of a uniform minimum of conditions for identical work throughout the kingdomj This uniformity of conditions, or, indeed, any industrial influence whatsoever, implies a cer tain uniformity and consistency of trade policy, which is Jonly rendered possible by centralisation of administraticuy So far, our conclusions lead, it would seem, to the absolute simplicity of one all-embracing centralised autocracy. But, in the Trade Union world, the problem of harmonising local ad- ministration and central control, which for a moment we seemed happily to have e;ot rid of, comes back in an even more intractable form. VThs very aim of uniformity of con- ditions, the very fact that uniformity of trade policy is indispensable to efficiency, makes it almost impossible to combine in a single organisation, with a common piirse, a common executive, and a common staff of salaried officials, men of widely different occupations and grades of skill, widely different Standards of Life and industrial needs, or widely different numerical strengths and strategic oppor- tunifiesj^ A Trade Union is essentially an organisation for securing certain concrete and definite advantages for all its
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members—advantages which differ from trade to trade according to its technical processes, its economic position, and, it may be, the geographical situation in which it is carried on. Hence all the attempts at "General Unions\ have, in our view, been inevitably foredoomed to failu^J The hundreds of thousands of the working class who joined the "Grand National Consolidated Trades Union" in 1833–34 came together, it is true, on a common basis of human brother- hood, and with a common faith in the need for a radical reconstruction of society. But instead of inaugurating a " New Moral World," either by precept or by political revolu- tion, they found themselves as a Trade Union, fighting the employers in the Lancashire cotton mills to get shorter hours of labor, in the Leeds cloth trade to obtain definite piecework rates, in the London building trade to do away with piecework altogether, in Liverpool to abolish the sub- contractor, in the hosiery trade to escape from truck and deductions. Each trade, in short, translated " human brother- hood" into the remedying of its own particular technical grievance, and the central executive wg£_jquite unable to check the accuracy of the translation. ^The whole history of Trade Unionism confirms the inference that a Trade Union, formed as it is, for the distinct purpose of obtaining concrete and definite material improvements in the conditions of its members' employment, cannot, in its simplest form, safely extend beyond the area within which thos e ident ical improvements are shared by all its members—cannot spread, that is to say, beyond