BRITISH LABOR BIDS FOR POWER
1. Making Labor History
During the mine crisis of July, 1925, British Transport Workers and Railway Workers stood solid with the Miners. Labor strategy, throughout the period, was determined by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. British Labor, showing a solid front to British Capital and to the British Government, won its point in the face of as difficult an economic situation as recent times have produced. The success gave the whole British Labor Movement a new sense of the power that comes with Trade Union Unity.
Neither the leaders of British Labor nor the members of the rank and file have any illusions about the 1925 coal settlement. The issue was not met. It was merely postponed until May, 1926. But the episode tested the new Trade Union machinery set up by the Hull Congress in 1924, and the workers feel that, both in the coal dispute and in the woolen textile dispute which occurred at the same time, the machine stood the test.
British Labor won a breathing spell in July, 1925—not a victory. Conversations among workers, speeches at public meetings and articles in the labor press are filled with the warning: "Next May!" It is in May that the coal subsidy comes to an end, and the issue between miners and mine owners over a wage reduction will really be fought out. Meanwhile unemployment mounts and wage reductions continue in other trades.
British workers face a real issue. Leaders and members of the rank and file alike realize this. All are preparing to meet it, and on a national and international scale.
British Labor's executive and administrative machinery is centralized in the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. Organized in 1868 as an annual meeting of delegates from Trade Unions, with a Parliamentary (or executive) Committee, very limited in authority, dating from 1869, the Trades Union Congress has developed until it is now the recognized centre of Trade Union authority in Great Britain. Its General Council, organized in 1921, and vested with extensive powers in 1924, is rapidly becoming the General Staff of the British Trade Union Movement. It was the General Council that handled the coal and the woolen textile disputes in July, 1925; it was the General Council that engineered the Russian Trade Union Delegation and issued the Report on Russia that has gone all over the world in the past twelve months; it was the General Council that carried on such insistent negotiations for Trade Union Unity, through 1924, against the stubborn opposition of Oudegeest, Jouhaux, Mertens, and other Amsterdam officials; it is the General Council that is expected to formulate and direct Trade Union policy when the crisis comes in May, 1926.[1]
- ↑ Two excellent pamphlets have been issued by the General Council from its office at 32 Eccleston Sq. London: The Story of the Trades Union Congress, and The General Council of the Trades Union Congress. The two may be had, postpaid, for 10 cents.