Engineers and was put into force under the Munitions of War
Acts. Profits in other industries were dealt with by means of the
Excess Profits Duty. The Treasury Agreements were given legisla-
tive force for the trades concerned with the supply of munitions
under the Munitions of War Act of 1915. The Act reaffirmed the
Treasury Agreements with regard to establishments " controlled "
by the Minister of Munitions: it set up machinery for compulsory
arbitration in wage disputes, limited the profits of controlled estab-
lishments to one-fifth in excess of their pre-war standard, forbade
munition workers to leave their employment without permission
from a munitions tribunal, ordered all customs restricting production
or employment to be suspended for the period of the war only, and
provided that " the relaxation of existing demarcation restrictions
or admission of semi-skilled or female labour shall not affect ad-
versely the rates customarily paid for the job." In practice, disputes
arising out of the last clause claimed an enormous proportion of
trade union attention during the war. In 1916 the Minister of
Munitions found it necessary to take powers, in an amending Act,
to fix general minimum rates for women employed in the munitions
industries, but the Government was freely accused of breaking its
pledges to the trade unions in the matter of wages to be paid to
substituted labour, and as dilution proceeded apace during the war
the controversy became more and more bitter.
The clauses in the Act dealing with restoration of the suspended customs were also the subject of dispute. These clauses merely stated that the suspension should be for the war period only, and made no explicit provision for their restoration. The trade unions con- tended that the Government was pledged to bringing a Bill for their restoration, and negotiations on this subject continued throughout the war period. Eventually, nearly a year after the Armistice, the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act was passed, which provided that, where the existence of a pre-war practice could be proved, it should be incumbent upon the employer to allow its restoration.
The institution of compulsory arbitration in the munitions in- dustries had one remarkable effect in the government of trade unions. As the trade unions concerned had practically pledged themselves not to strike for the period of the war, and as drastic penalties were provided under the Munitions Acts for any workman who struck, it followed that any strikes which did take place in the munitions industries must be unofficial, that is, conducted without authorization, or dispute pay, from trade union leaders. It was not to be expected that disputes would not arise, but these disputes fell to be conducted in the main, not by recognized trade union officials, but by unofficial committees elected from the workmen in a par- ticular shop or factory, and known generally as Shop Stewards' or Workers' Committees. This had relation to an interesting problem of trade union organization.
Shop Stewards. Originally, nearly all trade unions were built up of local branches, composed of all the men working at a particular trade who lived in a particular district. In the early days of machine industry, when towns and factories were comparatively small, this seemed the natural arrangement. Men working in a particular factory generally tended to be in the same residential branch, which thus achieved a trade as well as a neighbourhood unity. But as factories increased in size, and large urban aggregations became the rule, this unity disappeared. Workmen residing in a particular London suburb might be spending their working life in any one of a dozen widely separated and entirely different establishments, and might be faced with quite different industrial problems. This re- sulted in a stagnation of trade union branch life, which was re- flected in a meagre attendance at branch meetings, and created one of the greatest problems of the trade unions. The favourite solution of the difficulty, advocated particularly by the Industrial Unionists, Guild Socialists and latterly by the Communists, was the break-up of the old residential branches, and the reformation of the trade unions in branches composed of all members who worked together in a single establishment, the several trade union branches in such establishments then to join their forces to make a single industrial unit for the whole. Certain steps in that direction had already been taken before the war. The Miners' Federation, for example, had always based its organization upon branches composed of all the men working at a single pit or group of pits, the printers' trade unions had in every printing works committees of very ancient establishment, known as chapels, and the engineering trade unions had in most cases officials, called " shop stewards,' who were re- sponsible for the inspection of the contribution cards of members at their place of work in order to see that they were " genuine trade unionists" and for various other minor duties. These shop stewards, both those officially recognized by the trade unions, and Others unofficially appointed by the trade unionists in a particular works, enjoyed during the war a great access of importance. They included, in a majority of cases, the most active members of the trade unions, and those most imbued with the policy of "workers' control," and though general advances in wages and the broad principles of dilution and substitution were negotiated by the national bodies, all the concrete details of both the latter processes and the application of wage advances had to be dealt with on the spot, and an active man who was not deterred by possible fines and imprisonment under the Munitions Act, could wield real power in big engineering centres. Practically all the important munitions
strikes of the war period were conducted by the shop stewards, two of those which excited great public attention being the Clyde strikes of 1916, which resulted in the temporary deportation from the Clyde area of a number of the leading shop stewards, and the wide- spread engineering strikes of May 1917, caused by the proposal to extend dilution and substitution from the production of munitions of war to ordinary commercial work. These strikes succeeded in their object, and throughout the war dilution was confined to public work.
The shop-stewards' movement attained its greatest importance in the engineering industry, because of the existence of compulsory arbitration, the enormous increase in engineering work, and be- cause, owing to the multiplicity of trade unions catering for skilled and unskilled engineers, common action in the localities had been hitherto difficult to secure, and the appearance of a single flexible instrument uniting all sections resulted naturally in a great in- crease of activity. Parallel movements did, however, exist in in- dustries connected with the production of munitions, and in other industries such as shipbuilding, cotton and woollen textiles. The shop stewards in these industries occasionally made common cause with the engineering shop stewards on questions of policy, but except in shipbuilding they were of very much less importance. The shop-stewards' movement during the war contained a large revolutionary element which was hostile to the employing class and in many cases to official trade unionism, and aimed at securing workers' control of industry. The existence of this element led ill- informed observers to conclude that the shop stewards as a whole were a revolutionary force, and to attack them as dangerous and unpatriotic. In fact, even in the centres such as the Clyde, in which the revolutionary element was strong and vocal, and inclined to defy the executives of the trade unions on principle, there were throughout the war many shop stewards who aimed at no more than the recognized trade unions' objects of wages, hours and conditions of employment and had no concern with industrial theories. Shop stewards were in fact a recognized feature of trade unionism before the war. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers, in particular, demanded that shop stewards should be recognized as official spokesmen of the union on certain matters, and succeeded in carrying their point after lengthy negotiations. This agreement applied, of course, only to official stewards, who are now recognized by the Employers' Federation in the engineering trade as part of the official trade union machinery. At the end of the war, with the stoppage of work on munitions and the discharge of large numbers of workpeople, the importance of the unofficial element of the shop- stewards movement declined rapidly, and public attention was there- fore almost entirely diverted. The official trade unions resumed control of policy and disputes, the revolutionary elements among the shop stewards became part of the general Communist movement, and the rest returned to ordinary trade union activities, such as those laid down in the shop-stewards' agreements of 1918 and 1919. The influence of the movement on trade union government remained, however, and may be seen in various proposals for remodelling trade unions on a " workshop branch " basis.
Trade Union Action under War Conditions. Compulsory arbitra- tion had always been heartily disliked by the British trade union movement, and, but for the war, it is exceedingly doubtful whether it would ever have been accepted. The acceptance by the trade unions of war conditions, however, made its introduction possible, and although it did not by any means prevent the occurrence of a strike, when a dispute reached a certain point of bitterness, a large number of disputes, particularly in the munitions industries, which under other circumstances would have resulted in strikes, were settled under compulsory arbitration. The clauses, however, which enabled a dispute in a non-munitions industry to be " proclaimed " under the Munitions Act, and thereby rendered illegal, were less successful, and their unsuccess can be readily understood from a single instance that of the South Wales mining strike of 1915.
The Miners' Federation, which had not been a party to the Treasury Agreements, had never abrogated its right to strike, and the South Wales Miners' Federation, its largest constituent, was the first body to challenge the Munitions Act. In the summer of 1915 the South Wales miners threatened to strike for the purpose of en- forcing a revision of a wage agreement under which they had worked for five years, and though the dispute had been " proclaimed " under the Munitions of War Act, the strike nevertheless took place. It was clearly impossible to apply the penal clauses of the Act to a body of 200,000 miners, and after some discussion a settlement was reached which conceded to the miners the majority of their demands. ( >t her important disputes, such as the strike of employees of the Coopera- tive Wholesale Society in 1918, were also " proclaimed " under the Munitions Act, but in every case the number of men who left work was sufficient to enable them to defy the proclamation.
Consideration of the miners' case leads us to the second important branch of trade union activity during the war, namely that of securing wage advances to their members. For some time this activity was practically in abeyance, unions having agreed, at the beginning of the war, to hold over their demands for an advance in their members' standard of life. Only certain sections, such as the railwaymen, to whom an advance was known to be overdue, ob- tained any additions to their wages during the first six months ot
