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For some time the Treasury Employees' organisations have been bearing strong marks of craft conceptions of trade-unionism. Employees engaged in private undertakings of a financial nature tried to build up an organisation separate from the line organisations of Civil Servants, employed in public financial institutions, and the same separatist tendency dominates. the Government Employees' Movement. The „All-Russian Union of Employees in private and credit institutions“, organised in May 1917, tried to combine all the workers, employed in Commercial Banks, Land Banks, Banking Houses, Exchange Offices, Societies for Mutual Credit, Credit Cooperative organisations and Public Pawn-shops. Employees, working in Government financial departments have built up not a single, but many unions—as many as there were separate departments in the Ministry of Finance,—namely one for Treasury and its branch offices, one for excisemen, one for tax-collections inspecting staff, one for custom officers, one for Saving Banks.
Employees, one for Employees of the State Bank & of provincial branches, one for Employees of the Granary Elevator Department. In just the same manner the Sate Staff of the „State Control“ has been keeping aloof and preferred to build up its own union.
Such was the general picture of the movement among the Employees up till the time of the November Revolution.
The latter added a new impetus to the tendency of treasury Employees to organise themselves, but this time on the lines of industry. Nationalisation of private Banks, closing up of the Societies for Mutual Credit and various Land Banks, incorporation of Municipal Banks, with a single „People's Bank of the Republic“ made it necessary for the workers employed in these institutions to reconstruct their various unions in accordance with the new organisation of financial business. This reconstruction has been
