Trade Unionism and Labor Problems

Excerpt from Trade Unionism and Labor Problems
The House of Commons is a representative assembly of two delegates from each local union of longshoremen. The dock managers, to the number of twenty or thirty, meet in their house on one side of the street; the longshoremen, to the number of sixty or more, meet in another house on the other side. Each house appoints a conference committee of four or five members, including its president and secretary. These committees receive proper instructions from their constituent bodies. They meet in joint sessions, where they present their demands and counter-demands. They are referred back to the respective houses for discussion and further instructions. In this way, for ten or fifteen days, they higgle and bluff and parry until they can agree on a scale of wages and conditions of labor for every port and every kind of traffic under their joint jurisdiction. There is no arbitration; nothing is submitted to a disinterested third party. Each house has a veto on the other. The legislation adopted must be such that each independently consents to it; not that each is fully satisfied with it, but that each is convinced that nothing better can be secured without civil war, i.e. a strike or lockout. In this way, some twenty dock companies and several thousand dock laborers have created the highest form of industrial peace, - constitutional government.
The bituminous mine operators and the bituminous mine workers of the four great states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have essentially the same constitution, except that the two houses meet at times upon the same floor. This annual interstate conference of the bituminous coal industry is the most picturesque and inspiring event in the modern world of business. Here is an industry where, for many years, industrial war was chronic, bloodshed frequent, distrust, hatred, and poverty universal. To-day the leaders of the two sides come together for a two weeks' parliament, face to face, with plain speaking, without politics, religion, or demagogy; and there they legislate for an industry that sends upon the market annually $200,000,000 of product.