CHAPTER XIV THE SHOP STEWARDS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE THE swing toward the left in British labor, which we have followed in its organized front in foreign and domestic politics, showed itself still earlier in the economic field in the new movements for workers' control. We have long had outreachings toward democracy in industry in the thrust of craft unionism, in the socialist movement for state ownership of the means of production, in the more recent syndicalist movement for producer's ownership. But there is something at work in England which can be differentiated from all three. It is manifesting itself spontaneously in the insurgency of the shopstewards. It is manifesting itself organically in the rise of industrial unionism. It is manifesting itself deliberately in the recommendations by the Whitley Committee for industrial councils which have been adopted by the British government as the basis for its policy for industrial reconstruction; and deliberately, also, in the plans of far-sighted employers and the propaganda of the guildsocialists. These manifestations will in turn be the subjects of this and two succeeding chapters. The rise of the shop stewards is laid in the engineering trades - the machinists, as we know them in America; the munitionmakers, as the war cast them in a new rôle. In that new rôle, the women workers have been their understudies; and the fortunes of the two are, willy nilly, bound up together. Yet, in a sense, the shop steward is offspring of the "father” (or as we call him, chairman) of the printers' chapel, an institution older than unionism itself. By usage dating back to Caxton's time, the oldest journeyman printer has represented his fellows in taking up things with the management. At various stages in British industrial history, rough and ready shop leaders have played their part. Before the war, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (A. S. E.) had established stewards in various plants. They were the men who looked out for the interests of the union in the particular shop. They would ask a new man to show his union card and, if he had none and refused to join, then it would be made uncomfortable for him by the other unionists. The shop stewards would get together temporary shop committees to take up some plant grievance with the employer. The shop stewards were often fired offhand by the management if they were found out. While they were unremunerated save for perhaps a few shillings a quarter for turning in their reports, and while they stood a chance of dismissal, the prestige of their position and their fidelity to the union made it characteristic of the stewards that they were usually the most responsible, biggest-calibered men about the works. Finally, the practice reached a stage when the A. S. E. undertook to guarantee these men their wages for a year, or until they found employment elsewhere, if they were discharged for union activity. This led to the spread of the movement and under war conditions it went ahead even more rapidly. There were several causes for this. As we shall see, the first year of the war the national unions (miners excepted) agreed not to strike and they agreed to waive all the trade union restrictions and regulations which for a generation had been built up to safeguard the status and income of skilled men. The effect of the agreement was to scrap old machines, introduce speeding up and dilute the labor force in the war trades with unskilled and semi-skilled men, women and youths. The effect was, also, to shelve the old negotiating and conciliating machinery between employers and employees, just at the time that the abandonment of the rules and regulations and the influx of "dilutes" made local issues more real. In view of the fact that these issues had thus, in war time, to be settled, not by bargaining, but by decision of the arbitration boards under the munitions act, the district trade union committees tended to side-step them and pass them up to the nationals, and the nationals to pass them on to the government tribunals. Moreover, under the war conditions, the new workers sought representation and a chance to count. The result was the growth of shop stewardism as a spontaneous groping after local remedy. It has taken many forms—sometimes the selection of a single steward for all crafts and all grades of skill as the representative of the men of a plant in meeting with their employers; sometimes the getting together of several stewards in a large plant; sometimes the getting together of the shop stewards of one district in a common committee for joint action. This brought them at various times and places into conflict with district committees, with the national unions, with the employers and with the government; conflicts which spread rather than confined the movement; conflicts which brought them individual setbacks only to break the way for newer and further incarnations of the same active principle elsewhere. To understand these outcroppings of self-assertion at a hundred points—which can be compared only to a new rough and ready local leadership breaking through the crusts of a stale political régime-such as the overthrow of the Whigs by the headstrong Jackson Democrats in the 20's—it is necessary to retrace some of the developments of the last four years, more in detail. It must be borne in mind, in doing so, that the war did not create English industrial unrest. It merely speeded it up along with output. In 1913, Great Britain had 1,497 strikes and lockouts, involving 688,925 workpeople, and a duration in working days of 11,630,732. In coal-mining 200,000 persons were involved, in engineering 50,000. The war intensified the causes of dispute, and in 1917, 267,000 miners were involved, and 316,000 engineering workers. Modern big-scale standardized industry had long before the war outgrown its checks and controls, and was seeking others which would permit it to function productively, smoothly and justly. It was seeking a government of its own, autocratic or self-governing, according as you focussed attention on the big managers or on stirrings in rank and file. When the war need came to produce standardized goods swiftly, in immense quantities, the directorate and the workers could not operate under the old constitution. The power-driven machine tool had entered industry. An automatic machine is "a machine which, after the job has been fixed, requires no hand adjustment.” Specialized work is done by such machines, one person forging nuts, another superintending their tapping, a third turning their ends, a fourth shaping their sides, another hardening them, a sixth polishing them. This means, carried over a period of years, that unskilled and semi-skilled labor takes over the process from the skilled worker, who is used only to set up the machine. It means that women and children supplant the adult male.1 THE LOST SAFEGUARDS Before the war the introduction of low-paid women as machine tenders had made for simmering trouble in the engineering trades. With the half million of women entering these trades (which are the munition trades) under the demands of war, the trouble boiled up. In the autumn of 1914, a great armament firm put in women on shell-making, with a wage-reduction of 50 per cent from the standard rate of men. An agreement was reached between the Employers' Federation and the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, restricting female labor to purely automatic operations. The men thus conceded the right of women to take part in the process of shell-making, 1"Women in the Engineering Trades,” by Barbara Drake. |