WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE 1917

PROBLEMS OF LABOUR UNREST 179
workshop organisations in which the interests of all the crafts
employed would be considered jointly. This was particularly
developed by those stewards who advocated the amalgamation
of the craft unions in large combinations representing the
whole body of skilled workers in an industry — as, for
example, the National Union of Railwaymen incorporates
the various grades of railway workers.
Before the War, neither shop stewards nor workshop
organisations had any power as negotiating bodies with employers.
But some of them were feeling after that power,
and thus rousing the suspicion and antagonism of the established
hierarchy of the Trade Unions. It must be admitted
that the machinery of Trade Unionism was at the time in
need of serious overhaul. One can have the heartiest sympathy
with the aims of Trade Unionists, and yet recognise
that the forms of organisation they had developed haphazard
in their fights of the nineteenth century, and the
principles they had sought to lay down for the government
of workshop activity, were not always ideal in the interests
either of workers or employers. The movement for reform
of the system was interrupted by the War. The emergency
legislation which restricted the use of the strike weapon still
further impaired the authority of the Trade Union leaders,
and gave local agitators opportunities of seizing the reins.
These opportunities were increased by the introduction of
dilution. For dilution was essentially a workshop problem,
and whatever bargain might be come to with Trade Union
officials, the actual arrangements for the introduction of
diluted labour had to be made separately in each workshop,
by agreement with the skilled workers there. In practice, that
meant that they had to be made with the shop stewards,
who thus became the key men in negotiations with labour.
In districts where the shop stewards were imbued with
syndicalist notions of "workers' control" of industry, they