chiefly occupied with enrolling new members, negotiating wage advances, dealing with fresh proposals for the " combing-put " of industrial workers for the army, and in other activities mentioned above. With the Armistice, however, a revival took place, and every trade union formulated a programme of advance. The programmes differed in individual cases. All included shortening of hours, con- solidation of war advances into permanent wages, and the establish- ment of national or area minimum rates; and some added national- ization with workers' control, and full maintenance, by the industry or the State, for workers out of employment. The movement for shorter hours first took shape. During the war, the working hours in many industries had been reduced, generally to 48 or 50, and re- searches made under Government auspices had established the fact that long hours of work did not result in greater production. The Factory Acts, however, and other legal enactments governing the hours of work remained unaltered, and there was a general demand for the enactment of a universal 48-hour minimum for all labour, when, in Jan. 1919,3 series of strikes in favour of a 40- or 44-hour week broke out in many of the industrial centres. These were suppressed, but almost immediately the trade unions began to put forward their programmes, of which the most complete was that of the Miners' Federation, which included a national advance of wages, a shorter working week, and a full scheme for the nationalization of the mines and their administration under boards composed of representatives of the Miners' Federation and of the Government. On this pro- gramme a national mining strike was threatened. There was also grave unrest on the railways and in the engineering industry, and a great industrial upheaval was generally predicted. To prevent this, the Government appointed the royal commission on the coal in- dustry (the Sankey Commission) and also called together a large national industrial conference, representative of employers' associa- tions and trade unions, to discuss necessary changes in the laws governing industrial conditions. The Committee elected by the conference (on which the unions in the Triple Industrial Alliance refused to serve), after long discussion, agreed upon changes relative to hours, wages, and the relief of unemployment. It had been under- stood that proposals agreed upon by both sides of the conference would be translated into legislation, and upon this basis the dis- cussions had been held ; but when the time for legislation came, fresh difficulties were discovered, and the legislation was never introduced. Finally in 1921 both sides of the conference, finding their efforts useless, tendered their resignations. Individual reductions in the hours of labour, however, continued to take place during 1919, but these had no legislative force. The Coal Commission sat in session for a long time, taking evidence from widely differing sources, and creating a great public sensation by the appearance for the first time of trade union advocates cross-examining the leading owners of mines and mining royalties. An advance of wages and a short- ening of hours was recommended and became law in the summer. On the question of nationalization the Commission was divided; the members appointed by the Miners' Federation recommending the acceptance of the miners' programme, while the mine-owners' representatives declined to accept it. The chairman's report, recommending nationalization with a measure of workers' control, but conceding only a part of the miners' demands, was presented to the Government, which after some deliberation declined to accept it. The miners thereupon threatened a strike, and brought the matter up before the meeting of the Trade Union Congress in the autumn, but failing to obtain adequate promise of support from their fellow trade unionists by March, they decided to accept the situation. The Coal Commission was the first instanceof a tribunal, equally representative of employers and trade unions, being set up under Government auspices to pronounce upon a particular dispute, and considerable disappointment was expressed in trade union circles at the Government's refusal to carry out its findings. The precedent was, however, followed in the Industrial Courts Act of the same year, under which the Minister of Labour was empowered to refer any dispute to an industrial tribunal similarly constituted. This Act was used by the trade unions in several instances, notably in the case of disputes at the docks and on the tramways, to obtain a public hearing of their claims. When the trade depression came, however, the Industrial Courts Act was not used. The employers preferred to present their demands for wage reductions direct to the trade unions, and the attempts of the latter to invoke the assistance of the Act were uniformly unsuccessful. During the year the trade unions continued to press forward claims for shorter hours, wage advances, and consolidation of war wages, and in most cases met with some meed of success. The exception was a strike of policemen in London and some other large centres for an increase of wages, which was met by the immediate dismissal of all policemen on strike, the disbandment of the National Union of Police and Prison Officials, and its replacement by a Police Federation under official auspices and prescribed in an Act of Parliament. The disbanded union, however, continued to exist as a rallying ground for the dismissed policemen. This is the sole occasion in Great Britain in recent years when membership in a trade union has been made illegal.
The railway strike of the autumn, whjch arose out of a wage dispute, was remarkable for the extensive counter-preparations made by the Government. The Government, as well as adopting
for the first time the practice of inserting advertisements of its offers and arguments in the public press a practice which was followed by the National Union of Railwaymen organized an extensive system of road motor transport, and arranged for the enrolment of volunteers prepared to work on the railways. These preparations were repeated on a more extended scale in the spring of 1921, when a strike of the three unions composing the Triple Alliance was feared, and the Emergency Powers Act of 1920 very considerably strengthened the hands of the executive in dealing with a strike in an " essential industry." The establishment of the principle that the Government was immediately concerned in the case of strikes in "essential industries" to see that necessary serv- ices were carried on materially affected the position of the trade unions in those industries. The railway strike ended in a com- promise under which the National Union of Railwaymen accepted rates of wages which rose and fell automatically with the rise and fall in the Government figure of the cost of living, a means of adjust- ing wages which had already been accepted in a number of other trades (see STRIKES).
Early in 1920 the unparalleled shortage of working-class houses led to the remarkable development known as the Building Guild movement. This was the most direct application yet seen of the industrial theories of the Guild Socialists (see GUILD SOCIALISM). A Government committee had previously estimated the shortage of working-class houses at five hundred thousand, but owing to the very high cost of building and materials, the dearness of credit, and the difficulty of recalling to the building industry the many opera- tives who had left it in the depression prior to the war, hardly any building was in progress. Under these circumstances, led by Mr. S. C. Hobson, a Manchester Guild Socialist, the building trade unionists of Manchester formed themselves into a Building Guild, and offered to build houses for the Manchester Corporation and other local authorities in Lancashire at cost price plus a percentage to cover office expenditure, incidental charges, and the cost of maintaining every member of the Guild at full wages in sickness, bad weather, or unemployment, thus putting into practice the principle, advocated by many trade unionists, that , each industry should be responsible for the full maintenance of all its workers, whether or not there was work available for them at any particular moment. No profits of any kind went to members of the Guild. The credit of the local authority was to suffice for the purchase of plant and materials, many of which were in the first instance bought with the assistance of the Cooperative Wholesale Society. The tenders of the Manchester Guild were accepted in a number of instances, though the limitation placed by the Government on the total number of Guild contracts which could be placed by local au- thorities considerably restricted their field, and the example of Manchester was followed by over a hundred bodies of trade union- ists in various parts of the country, including London, which in the following year united to form a single National Building Guild. The Government's restriction of their work upon public contracts led the Guilds to solicit work from private companies and persons, which in a number of instances was secured. Trade Union Guild Councils, formed for the purpose of inducing other industries to take up the idea, were set up in several districts, and the furnishing trade was among the first to follow suit. The particular interest of the Building Guilds, distinguishing them from other experiments in industrial self-government by the working-classes, lies first in the absence of profits, secondly in the principle of industrial maintenance of all workers, thirdly in its limitation to trade unionists, and fourthly in the cooperation of technical as well as manual workers, representatives of architects and surveyors being given a place on the Guild committees.
With all these various developments trade unions had attained an important place in social life by the end of 1920. But in that year the trade prosperity came to an end. The trades producing for ex- port had been gradually losing practically the whole of their European markets owing to the financial collapse of a great part of Europe, and their workmen were discharged in large numbers. This in its turn reacted upon the home market ; there was a sharp fall in wholesale prices, a general and rapid decline in trade, resulting in the total unemployment of between one and two million work- people in the summer of 1921. As soon as the trade depression be- came apparent, there was a general move to reduce wages. The legislation confirming war rates of wages for a time had expired dur- ing the previous year, and the way was therefore clear for immediate reductions. In many of the minor trades, where trade unionism was weak, these were enforced immediately, the widespread un- employment inclining the workers to accept any reduction rather than run the risk of losing their employment; the well-organized trades were faced during 1921 with demands for wage reductions, of which that presented to the miners was the most important.
Council of Action. One event of this period needs describing in some detail, because it was the most successful attempt of the trade union movement to intervene in foreign politics. The events in Russia, since the revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the Bolshevik Government in Nov. of that year, had been followed with great interest by trade unionists. More from sympathy with anti- capitalist Governments in general than because any but a few of its members were in agreement with Bolshevik theories, the Labour
