Contents
Preface
Introduction to the New Edition
PART I
TRADE UNION STRUCTURE
Chap
I. Primitive Democracy.
II. Representative Institutions.
III. The Unit of Government.
IV. Interunion Relations.
PART II
TRADE UNION FUNCTION
Chap
I. The Method of Mutual Insurance..
II. The Method of Collective Bargaining.
III. Arbitration.
IV. The Method of Legal Enactment.
V. The Standard Rate.
V1. The Normal Day.
V1I. Sanitation and Safety.
VIII. New Processes and Machinery.
IX. Continuity of Employment.
X. The Entrance to a Trade.
(a) Apprenticeship
(b) The Limitation of Boy Labour.
(c) Progression Within the Trade
(d) The Exclusion of Women
XI. The Right to a Trade.
XII. The Implications of Trade Unionism.
XIII. The Assumptions of Trade Unionism.
PART III
TRADE UNION THEORY
Chap
I. The Verdict of the Economists.
II. The Higgling of the Market.
III. The Economic Characteristics Of Trade Unionism.
(a) The Device of Restriction of Numbers.
(b) The Device of the Common Rule.
(c) The Effect of the Sectional Application of the Common Rule
On the Distribution of Industry
(d) Parasitic Trades
(e) The National Minimum
(f) The Unemployable
(g) Summary of the Economic Characteristics of the Device Of
The Common Rule
(h) Trade Union Methods
IV. Trade Unionism and Democracy.
APPENDICES
The Legal Position of Collective Bargaining in England—The Bearing of Industrial Parasitism and the Policy of a National Minimum on the Free Trade Controversy—Some Statistics bearing on the Relative Movements of the Marriage and Birth-Rates, Pauperism, Wages, and the Price of Wheat—A Supplement to the Bibliography of Trade Unionism.
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Problems of Modern Industry
“No book could be more opportune. The sale of alcoholic liquor has been under statutory regulation by means of licences for 300 years; but the period which Mr. and Mrs. Webb have taken as their special study deserves the very careful examination they give to it, for within those 130 years we find periods of regulation and suppression, of laxness and neglect in regard to the control of the liquor traffic, equally instructive. There is during this period one brief six years wherein the magistrates, awaking to their responsibilities and compelled to a consciousness of the evil results of excessive gin-drinking, made a general effort to improve the condition of things through the one means in their power. To this remarkable episode the authors devote a valuable chapter. Strangely enough, it has hitherto not been noticed by historians, nor has it been mentioned in the voluminous literature of the temperance movement. Yet the effort of the magistrates during those six years was very far-sighted. It included—
“The deliberate and systematic adoption of such modern devices as early closing, Sunday closing, the refusal of new licences, the withdrawal of licences from badly conducted houses, the peremptory closing of a proportion of houses in a district over-supplied with licences, and, in some remarkable instances, even the establishment of a system of local option and local veto, both as regards the opening of new public-houses and the closing of those already in existence, all without the slightest idea of compensation.
“All this in the closing years of the eighteenth century! But what a contrast to this spasm of local statesmanship the earlier years of that drink-sodden century display! Then, and not really till then, were sown the seeds of drunkenness in England. Contrasted with that reign of orgy the action of the magistrates in 1787 seems all the brighter, and the disappearance of the fact from public memory the more remarkable. Mr. and Mrs. Webb bring their detailed story to an end with the Drink Bill of 1830, which led to another outbreak of the drinking habit.”—Guardian.
“A valuable contribution to the history of the liquor traffic.”—Political Science Quarterly.
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—Speaker.
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Appendix
Bibliography of the Industrial Revolution—List of Parliamentary Papers Relating To Labour Question in this Century—Classified Tables of Associations of Producers—Extract from Letter from Mr. D. F. Schloss—Table of Percentages of Co-operative Sales per Hundred of Population—Table of the Relative Progress of the Co-operative Movement.
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DER SOCIALISMUS IN ENGLAND. Geschildert
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Herausgegeben von SIDNEY WEBB