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cases of major public interest. From 1920 through 1937, 20 courts were appointed.14 Under the law the appointment of a court does not operate to stop or postpone a dispute; the purpose is to expose the facts and to bring public opinion to bear on the merits.

54. Trade boards.-These activities of the Ministry of Labor have been effectively reinforced by the Trade Board Acts, which authorize under certain conditions the creation of boards (composed of representatives of employers, employees, and the public) having power to fix minimum wages and to declare normal working hours (with overtime rates thereafter) in particular industries.

55. Following in part the second report of the Whitley Committee 1918, Parliament amended the Trade Board Act of 1909, which had limited the application of trade boards to "sweated" industries, to permit the Minister of Labor to set up a trade board in any trade in which, in his opinion, “no adequate machinery exists for the effective regulation of wages throughout the trade, and that accordingly, having regard to the rates of wages prevailing in the trade or any part of the trade, it is expedient that the acts should apply to that trade." Thus, although there are no laws to compel union recognition, or to compel collective bargaining, and the Government consistently maintains the principle of noninterference with voluntary collective bargaining, yet in industries having no effective organization and excessively low wages the Government may, and does, set up trade boards to determine minimum standards by legislative and administrative processes.

56. It should be added, however, that the resort to such procedure is not favored by Government, by organized labor, or by employers' associations until every possibility of voluntary determination of wages and working conditions in the trade have been thoroughly explored. Even then the Ministry of Labor presses for a certain minimum of voluntary agreement within the trade as a prerequisite to the setting up of a trade board.

57. The Ministry of Labor continuously studies the desirability of setting up additional trade boards in particular trades. In considering these possibilities the Ministry at all times consults with employers and employers' associations, and with the unions, which have any membership in the trade. Because of the difficulty of exactly defining the limits of a particular trade or industry, it is customary for the Minister to prepare and circulate to all of the employers' and workers' organizations a tentative draft definition of the trade in which he proposes to set up a trade board; and to bring about informal conferences with the parties until an acceptable definition is reached. Thereupon the Minister publishes a notice of his intention to apply the acts, together with a draft of the special order. Not less than 40 days must be given for objections, and if the Minister thinks any of the objections are substantial, he must either amend or withdraw the order and direct a public inquiry. In case of amendment there must be republication with notice. When the special order is finally published it must be laid forthwith before each House of Parliament, and if either House objects within the next 40 days of sittings, the Crown may annul the order. In no case has either House exercised this right.

58. A trade board, under the acts, must be made up of representatives in equal number of employers and workers in the trade, together with a number of impartial members not greater than one-half the total number of "representative" members. One of the impartial members presides, and the impartial members have the deciding vote if the representative members cannot agree. The Minister of Labor must appoint all the members. In practice, any employers' associations and unions existing in the trade are asked to nominate representatives for appointment, and, in addition, representatives of unorganized sections of the trade are often selected by the Minister.

59. Each trade board is required to fix for its own industry a "general minimum" time rate of wage. They commonly fix, also, general minimum piece rates and, if the occasion requires, "piecework basis time rates;" that is, rates fixed in hourly terms applicable to piece workers and calculated to yield to the "ordinary" worker not less than the fixed minimum time rate; "guaranteed time rates," guaranteeing to piece workers a minimum payment according to the time they have worked, irrespective of their output; and "special minimum piece rates" for special cases where no general minimum piece rate has been fixed. The board may fix rates below the "general minimum" for juveniles, for adult learners, and for workers who, because of certified infirmity or physical injury, are not able to earn a standard wage. The general minimum may be different for different areas, and special rates above the general minimum may be fixed for different classes of workers. The boards are also empowered to "declare" the normal number of weekly or daily hours and to fix the overtime rates.

60. The process of fixing rates has been described as one of bargaining, with the course of the negotiations influenced by the fact that any deadlock may be settled by the votes of the independent members. Proposals and counterproposals are negotiated between the two sides with the independent members acting as conciliators in an endeavor to reach agreed wage scales; but if an agreement cannot thus be reached, the votes of the independent members decide. Rates of wages proposed by a board must be communicated to employers and workers, and 2 months allowed for objections; after which the board may proceed to fix the rates or make new proposals. The rates do not become effective until they have been confirmed by the Minister of Labor, who may refer a rate back to the board but cannot fix one. Rates confirmed by the Minister of Labor may be enforced by either civil or criminal proceedings. They are enforced by the Minister of Labor through a body of inspectors. 61. In addition to thus establishing minimum rates, declaring normal hours and fixing overtime rates, the trade boards are obliged to consider matters referred to them by the Government departments, and the Government departments are required to give immediate consideration to matters referred to them by the boards. Thus, a trade board is the authoritative mouthpiece of the trade.

62. Eight trade boards were set up under the 1909 act. There are now, under the 1918 act, over 40 trade boards in operation. In the year 1938 the Trade Board Acts were applied to the baking trade, and an application of the principle was made, by special legislation, to road transport. In this legislation the boards are expressly em

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powered to set up machinery for the settlement of local disputes and grievances, and to promote the voluntary organization of employers and workers.

63. Application of the acts to the distributive trades has been under active discussion for some time by the employers' associations and the workers' associations in the industry and by the Ministry of Labor; and more recently for the rubber manufacturing trade. We have already spoken of the temporary legalization of wage scales for cotton weaving agreed to by representative organizations of employers and workers.

64. The statutory fixing of maximum hours (aside from the power of the trade boards to declare the normal hours of work per day or week after which overtime rates apply) is limited to the fixing of hours of underground labor in the coal mines, the hours of service. of certain railway and road transport workers, and the hours of work of women and young persons in factory employment.

65. The Fair Wages Clause. On March 10, 1909, a resolution passed the House of Commons that Government contracts should require the contractor to "pay rates of wages and observe hours of labor not less favorable than those commonly recognized by employers and trade societies (or, in the absence of such recognized wages and hours, those which in practice prevail among employers) in the trade in the district where the work is carried on." Responsibility for the inclusion of such fair-wages clauses in Government contracts rests with the several contracting departments, but an interdepartmental coordinating committee, the Fair Wages Advisory Committee, has been set

The Local Government Act, 1933, requires (sec. 266) that all contracts entered into by a local authority shall be made in accordance with the standing orders of the authority; and there is an extensive inclusion in such standing orders of the Fair Wages Clause in the same or similar terms. By the Road Traffic Act, 1930, and the Road and Rail Traffic Act, 1933, the Fair Wages Clause was made applicable to the road transport industry, and under the new transport legislation the clause, with modifications, is still applicable to private carriers who carry their own goods, not for hire.

III. EVOLUTION OF EXISTING METHODS OF SETTLING
INDUSTRIAL DISPUTES

66. At the beginning of this report we referred to the long and gradual development of union organizations and employers' associations, and of the methods of collective bargaining between them. These methods have been evolved experimentally, and have been tested and from time to time modified, in the light of experience. Both sides have learned in the process, and their background of experience is an integral part of the present arrangements.

67. By the latter part of the nineteenth century labor unions were well established in a number of industries in Great Britain. The growth of trade-union membership from that period to the present time is shown completely in appendix C. The trend is from 1,576,000 at the end of 1892; 2,022,000 in 1900; 4,145,000 in 1914; 8,347,000 in 1920; 5,506,000 in 1925; 4,389,000 in 1933, and 5,308,000 in 1936. No similar figures are available for the growth of employers' associa

tions, but as the following review of the evolution of collective bargaining will show, local, district, or industry-wide associations of employers had already been established in important industries before the turn of the century. The extent and influence of such organizations were much augmented during the war, when the Government dealt on an industry-wide basis with employers and unions; there was a further enlargement and crystallization in the years immediately after the war under the spur of the Ministry of Labor, following the recommendations of the Whitley Committee. Their extent at the end of 1936 has already been mentioned (ante par. 9). 68. The historical evolution of collective bargaining in Great Britain may be traced in the pages of Government reports. (See appendix D.) A report "on the strikes and lock-outs of 1888," presented in 1889 to both Houses of Parliament, states that in Great Britain, "as the foremost producing nation of the world, labor quarrels have been more frequent, on a larger scale, and more pertinaciously fought out" than elsewhere, and that "here the fighting organizations of masters and men have been most highly developed." It appears from the report that this period of struggle began at least as far back as the first quarter of the century, after the repeal of the combination laws in 1825. By the time the report was made, however, the attempt to suppress unions and strikes by force of law had been long abandoned. The report notes that the day had long since passed when it was necessary to argue at length as to the legality of a strike, or as to whether such a step on the part of the workers was at all justifiable; and that masters and workmen were at liberty to form organizations for all kinds of trade purposes.

69. The development of conciliation machinery by collective arrangements between organizations of employers and unions, which was to become the dominating feature of the industrial relations of later years, was commented upon in this 1889 report as follows:

Not only has there been a considerable spreading during the last 20 years of the methods of settling disputes by arbitration and conciliation, but modes of prevention have grown up in addition to these and are happily securing wider adoption. These methods of arranging difficulties have only been made possible by organization of the forces on both sides, and have, as it were, been gradually evolved from the general progress of the combination movement.

70. That the development of these methods had not yet become very extensive appears, however, from the final report of the Royal Commission on Labor in 1894. This Commission was appointed in 1891 and sat for 3 years. It submitted to Parliament four interim reports, and a fifth and final report in which it classified British industries into three groups: (a) Those principal industries in which the settlement of terms between employers and workers is mainly controlled by the action of trade-unions and employers' associations; (b) industries in which there are organizations of the employers for the protection of trade interests and of the workers for friendly benefit purposes, but only a part, and often a small part, of the workers and employers in the industry belong to these organizations, so that the organizations do not exert such controlling power over employer-worker relations; and (c) industries in which organizations of employers and of workers are insignificant or do not exist at all. Incidentally, the Commission noted that the collective agree

ments affected more persons than those who were in terms brought under them, pointing out that the evidence showed that in matters. of standards of wages and hours, one organized body of employers and workmen taking counsel together affect a larger area than that of their own trade.

71. The final report of this Commission of 1894 reflected a philosophy similar to that set forth in the 1888 report. Its fundamental conclusion was that strong organizations of employers and workers, dealing together through collective agreements and setting up machinery for conciliation and arbitration, afforded the most practical approach to industrial peace.

72. In the report the Commission analyzed the difficulties in the weakly organized trades, pointing out that peaceable relations are the result of strong and firmly established trade-unionism, and that trade-unionism in a weak and struggling condition rather tends to increase the number and bitterness of industrial conflicts; and that, from the experience of industries which have reached a high degree of organization, "the most quarrelsome period of a trade's existence is when it is just emerging from the patriarchal condition in which each employer governs his establishment and deals with his own men with no outside interference, but has not yet fully entered into that other condition in which transactions take place between strong associations fully recognizing each other." This was attributed in some measure to the fact that when organization has partially established itself latent grievances come to light, and to the fact that in early stages of organization the workmen have not yet learned by experience what their union can and what it cannot achieve, while the leaders have no great hold over the men. But the effort to force recognition was thought to be the chief cause of the frequent and violent conflicts which usually attend the earlier stages of organization.

73. In its final conclusions the 1894 Commission rejected all proposals for compulsory arbitration and for other limitations on the right to strike, and stated its opinion that "the chief matter of importance" was the "rapid extension of voluntary boards" of conciliation on a trade or district basis which "we hope and believe will continue until they cover a much larger part of the whole field of industry than they do at present."

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74. During the ensuing 15 years the collective bargaining relationships steadily developed, so much so that in a report to Parliament in 1910 the Board of Trade stated that "the method of collective bargaining may be said to prevail throughout the whole of our manufacturing industries and to obtain to a very considerable extent in regard to the employment of dock and waterside labor, and of labor employed in transport and sea fishing." The report summarized the extent of the collective agreements in the United Kingdom. From this summary it appears that in 1910 the collective agreements of a general trade or district character numbered 1,696, and the total number of workers whose conditions of labor were specifically regulated by these agreements was estimated to be 2,400,000. It was pointed out that in addition to those directly affected there were a large number of workers whose conditions of labor follow and are in effect governed by, the collective agreements, so that the total

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