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local Departments of Labour and for increasing the influence of trade union control on the current activity of the Department of Labour in the centre as well as on the periphery. All the responsible workers of the Labour Commissariat must be elected at the congresses or conferences of Trade Unions. A preliminary consideration of all questions of principle affecting labour must take place at joint meetings of the Executive (or general meeting) of the trade unions and the head (or the board) of the Department of Labour before any decision can be arrived at."
What of the Future?
These relations between the trade unions and a Department of the Soviet Government show that: (1) the state regulation of wages and the standardisation of labour is the exclusive function of the trade union, (2) in defining the conditions of labour the organs of the Soviet Government—the Commissariats of Labour—carry out in their entirety the instructions of the trade unions. In this connection one must observe the following: as the fixing of wages and the standardisation of labour is entirely the function of the trade unions, it is irrational to have another special organ to sanction its decisions; we get a parallelism in the work, and as we abolished organs created by the trade unions which were doing similar work to that done by Soviet organs so it is necessary to abolish Soviet organs which are doing work similar to that of the trade unions. The increased control and the further subordination of the Commissariat of Labour to the trade unions must lead to the practical abolition of the Commissariat of Labour, and to the transfer of its functions to the respective trade unions. After the practical abolition of this Department there must follow its formal abolition; and the trade unions will remain the sole organs responsible to the proletarian state for the organisation of labour and their decisions in this sphere will be subject to the sanction of their national central organs only. In this manner the whole work of organisation, protection and standardisation of labour is concentrated in the All-Russia Central Council of Trade Unions and its local organs. There will, therefore, be but two central national organs: one the All-Russia Central Council of Trade Unions, which concentrates its work on the organisation of labour, and the other, the Supreme Council of National Economy, which occupies itself exclusively with the organisation of production. But as labour is the fundamental factor in production, the next stage will lead to the simplification of the whole economic apparatus by the fusion of the All-Russia Central Council of Trade Unions with the Supreme Council of National Economy, and the industrial unions with the respective Chief and Central Committees for the administration of the nationalised undertakings. When this will take place is as yet not known, but this is the developing tendency, this is the iron logic of socialist economic construction.
