Here again, in dealing with the strikes, the government policy did not work out. Its experience with deporting the strike leaders from the Clyde worked out in fact so disastrously that it did not attempt drastic measures wholesale. Deportation is something which is peculiarly offensive to the English worker. It smacks of South Africa; it goes against his ingrained ideas as to his rights in his own home, and in his own home town. And while the labor movement in England might have been of two minds as to the issues of the Clyde strike and the notions of its leaders, it was not of two minds as to the treatment of the Clyde strikers. McManus was deported to another city which had been a center of labor conservatism, with the result that that city thereafter became a hotbed. Kirkwood, it is said, has since been made a foreman in a government munitions factory.

The government took the position in the case of a strike that it would not treat with the workers unless they went back. But a labor leader stated to us that, as a matter of fact, the government had crumpled in, time and again, and beat the devil around the stump in some other way; for example, by granting the demand, or some measure of it, without treating with the workers. This seemed so sweeping a statement that we took it up with a government official who frankly admitted its truth. The result was to prove pretty conclusively that the way to prevent strikes is not to prohibit them.

A Share in Management

But, as brought out on the Clyde, the shop stewards stand for something more far-reaching and constructive in its implications than the right to strike. They were asserting the right to an increased share in workshop management. They were doing it without consultation with the old-line officials of the unions ("We do not recognize them," said Kirkwood), and they were acting through an organization of shop stewards, representing unofficially all the shops in the district.

The position of the shop steward is a detail in labor organization. But the impulse of which the shop steward is an expression is from the rank and file of the labor movement. He came at a moment of arrest, when the trade union officials had been blocked by war legislation. He gathered up the dynamic of the rank and file and went ahead, while the officials

had to mark time. He captured the imagination of the unrepresented workers by direct action just when compromise and postponement were being forced upon them by their former leaders.

The shop stewards as a group are young men, the central officials are middle-aged. The shop stewards are not inured by a lifetime of troubled experience to piece-meal gains, to opportunism. In the hour when government officials were devising programs of workshop committees and joint councils, the shop stewards formed their own committees-a living embodiment of the Whitley Report.

The danger of unchartered liberty and youthful dynamic is clear. Yet a keen observer of labor conditions expressed the belief to us that there would not be permanent antagonism between the self-created shop stewards and the shop committees set up under this national program. Nor will there be permanent antagonism between the shop stewards and the national unions of organized labor. They are more likely harnessed to the main labor machine.

From the union standpoint, the immediate question is: Shall shop stewards of various trades receive recognition as the basis for common action in the works of a district?

Cole has suggested a way out.

G. D. H.

Let the general principle of organization be that of the works branch (instead of the residence branch). Then the shop stewards will become the branch officials, and the shop stewards' committee the branch committee. The unofficial workshop movement will have been taken up into, and made a part of, the official machinery of trade unionism.

At a national conference held between the Engineering Employers' Federation and the engineering trade unions, recognition was given to shop stewards, and their entry into negotiation in the early phases permitted. The A. S. E. did not sign the agreement. In December, 1917, representatives of the Engineering Employers' Federation and of thirteen trade unions held a conference. The unions included steam engine workers, toolmakers, smiths and strikers, brass founders and metal mechanics, blacksmiths and iron workers, electrical trades union, workers' union, journeymen brass founders, coremakers, general workers, union of enginemen. They came to an agreement that the functions of the stewards so far as they are concerned with the avoidance of disputes will be on the following lines:

A workman or workmen desiring to raise any question in which he or they are directly concerned shall in the first instance discuss the same with his or their foreman.

Failing settlement the question shall, if desired, be taken up with the management by the appropriate shop stewards and one of the workmen directly concerned.

If no settlement is arrived at the question may, at the request of either party, be further considered at a meeting to be arranged between the management and the appropriate shop steward, together with a deputation of the workmen directly concerned. At this meeting the organizing district delegate may be present, in which event a representative of the employers' association shall also be present.

The question may thereafter be referred for further consideration in terms of the provisions for avoiding disputes.

No stoppage of work shall take place until the question has been fully dealt with in accordance with this agreement and with the provisions for avoiding disputes.

Meanwhile, the shop stewards' movement is spreading out into woodworking trades, textiles and the boot and shoe trades.1

A prophet and philosopher of its extension (himself one of the leaders) is J. T. Murphy, of Sheffield, whose pamphlet, The Workers' Committee, might be called the official exposition of the movement. He believes that the new trade union organization will be based on the shop and the works, instead of the craft and the industry. He gives the power of final decision always to the rank and file, and never to the upper stories of organization. He visions shop stewards, shop committees, plant committees, district committees and then a national organization of districts.

But one thing is sure. While the government plans Whitley Committees (with the consent of the employer and the worker), and while farseeing employers encourage them, elsewhere the workers themselves elect their own stewards, choose their own committees, and set going from the bottom up the movement toward workers' control, which in its various embodiments will dominate industrial reconstruction in England. The shop stewards are those who have broken with tradition

1 The manufacturing sections of the cotton industry are now beginning to follow the spinners in the creation of shop committees. The Ashton and District Textile Manufacturing Trades Federation has elaborated a scheme for the appointment of shop stewards and shop committees. A steward is to be appointed for every fifteen or twenty workers, and the expenses are to be met by a shop levy of id. monthly. The stewards are to elect from themselves shop committees, and grievances are to be submitted to these committees, which will take them up with the management. Failing a settlement at this stage, the matter will be carried to the district Trade Union organization. Thus the movement towards workshop organization goes on spreading from one section of workers to another.

The Oldham operative cotton spinners have approved the adoption of the shop steward principal in the cotton mills by a majority of nearly two to one. It is provided under the scheme that there shall be a shop club at each mill, that all spinners at the mills must be members, and that the chairman, secretary, and committee of the respective shop clubs shall be representatives to the management in case of any grievance. Each shop club is to appoint two representatives to attend the district monthly meetings and report on the proceedings to their club.

at the place where the fight is hardest—in their own organization, in their own workshop.

THE SHOP STEWARDS' MOVEMENT'

The ascendency of the shop stewards is striking; for the movement is literally in its infancy. Fifteen months ago but few persons, even in England, knew anything about it. The shop stewards' control first came into prominence in November, 1917, during the big strike in the munitions factories at Coventry. The object of the strike was to obtain recognition for the shop stewards' committees of the various works in the district. The demand was first made in a single plant, at which there has been recrudescent trouble for a long period. It was refused by the management, on the ground that the whole question of recognition was the subject of negotiations between the firm and the official representatives of the union. The consequence was a strike in this establishment; within a week it had become general throughout Coventry. The situation there greatly alarmed public opinion, because the vital airplane industry was tied up, and the Government hastened to settle the strike. The shop stewards' committees were recognized in the engineering trade. The conference for the settlement of the Coventry disputes showed clearly that the recognition of the new movement was a deal not between the workers and the employers, or between the latter and the State, but between the rank and file and the trade union.

Shop stewards are by no means entirely new functionaries in the British labor world. As a matter of fact, shop stewards have always been the agents for the trade union branches (the smallest units of union activities). But the rank-and-file movement, which has loomed so large in the last year and is known as the shop stewards' movement, has no connection with the old union shop stewards. As an organization, it is doubtless a product of the war, and it has come into prominence under pressure of the war. But the adherents of the new movement assert that the shop steward idea was developing for many years before the war. They are confident that had there been no war, the shop stewards' organization would sooner or later have come to grips with the trade unions, and finally supplanted

From the Nation. 108:192-3. February 8, 1919.

them. They maintain that the industrial reaction against the futility of the doctrine that economic power can be acquired primarily by parliamentary political action (a doctrine extremely popular with British labor for the last twenty years) had become evident before the war. In spite of the great triumph of political labor, which at the outbreak of the war was safely intrenched in Parliament, economically British labor was weaker than before. While capital gained enormous power under the flourishing conditions of British industry, labor made no corresponding gain. The exaggerated hopes of Parliamentary successes, which ran high after the election of 1910, soon gave way to disappointment and depression, and the idea that industrial power is the real expression of working-class strength gradually grew in popularity. The new shop stewards' movement was the accumulated expression of this idea. But it could only come to a head when the war demonstrated the weakness of trade unionism and made the shop the unit of industrial activity.

ANOTHER EXPLANATION1

The shop stewards consider themselves the harbingers of a new unionism founded on a new democratic basis of real equality for all workers. The basis of the new unionism is the workshop, which is the natural unit for labor amalgamation and industrial activity. The shop stewards are chosen by all workers in the shop, skilled and unskilled alike, irrespective of the particular craft or affiliation. The complete and final amalgamation of the workers in the shop is the first step towards the great industrial union.

THE BRITISH SHOP STEWARD MOVEMENT"

What is known as the "Shop Steward Movement" in Great Britain is merely the machinery by which the rank and file of the organized workers have taken control of the Labor movement.

The name "Shop Stewards" is not new in British industry. Before the War the agents for the regular Trade Union

1 From the Nation.

108:279. February 22, 1919.

By George Ellery. The Voice of Labor. 1:13-14. August 30, 1919. (This article represents the subject from a radical's viewpoint-Ed.)