History of Industrial Councils

History of Industrial Councils in the United Kingdom

The formation of joint industrial councils (or, as they are commonly called, “Whitley Councils” ) has been one of the most important sequels of wartime developments in the attempt to adjust the relations of employers and employees in the organization of British industry. These joint industrial councils are bodies representing, usually in equal numbers, the organized employers and employees in the particular industries concerned; and they are the outcome of the recommendation made for this purpose by a committee (which became a sub-committee of the Reconstruction Committee) appointed in 1916 by Mr. Asquith, as Prime Minister, and presided over by Mr. J. H. Whitley, M.P. (then Chairman of Committees in the House of Commons), the reference being:?-

1. To make and consider suggestions for securing a permanent improvement in the relations between employers and workmen;

2. To recommend means for securing that industrial conditions affecting the relations between employers and workmen shall be systematically reviewed by those concerned, with a view to improving conditions in the future.

The Whitley Committee was composed of well-known representatives of trade unions and employers’ associations experienced in collective negotiations, with certain public men and women not directly associated with the interests of employers or employed. One of the most important developments in the improvement of industrial relations before the World War had been the establishment of voluntary conciliation boards or machinery for the settlement of labour disputes, and, in the course of a considerable number of years, such bodies or machinery had been established in most of the well-organized trades in the United Kingdom. Along with the great body of collective regulations established over a long period of years, this machinery was practically for the time being set aside by war conditions, which at the same time produced a remarkable growth in trade-union organization, and necessitated much consultation between the Government and representative bodies of employers and trade-unionists, who were also often associated in official boards of control, such as the Cotton Control Board.

When the Whitley Committee was appointed it was widely recognized that a permanent solution of the “Capital and Labour” question was one of the most important of the social and industrial problems of the post-war reconstruction, with a view to which first the Reconstruction Committee and later the Ministry of Reconstruction were formed. The origins of a few of the councils may be carried back, however, to a time before the appointment of the Whitley Committee, or even, in idea at least, to before the outbreak of war; and these origins are to be found in the desire of certain groups of individuals, with knowledge or experience of industrial disputes, to create some new form of joint organization which would unite the employers and employees in an industry in coÃ¼peration for common ends. Thus, the conception of a building-trades parliament may be traced back to 1914. Again, a national painters’ and decorators’ joint council was formed in the winter of 1916-7, before the publication of the first Whitley report. Before also the Whitley Committee reported, the activities initiated by certain private individuals interested in industrial matters, leading up to the formation of the Pottery Joint Industrial Council (the first of the officially recognized Whitley Councils), had been in progress for some time.

Here it may be noted that the name “Industrial Council” has been applied to other bodies which must not be confused with the joint industrial councils set up through the Whitley report, though they have certain connexions with these councils. Further reference to these bodies is made at the end of this article.

The Whitley Committee presented an interim report on joint standing industrial councils in March 1917 (Cd. 8606). In this report they recommended that, so far as the main industries of the country , in which there existed representative organizations of employers and employees, were concerned, the best way to deal with the first point in the terms of reference was to settle the second point, and for this latter they proposed the institution of joint standing industrial councils. The proposed councils were to be joint, so as to bring employers and workpeople together; standing, to ensure the regular discussion of matters of common interest; and industrial?-?that is, formed on an “industrial” rather than a trade or craft basis. In order to secure the realization of what may be considered the fundamental idea of “continuous coÃ¼peration in the promotion of industry” the committee recommended that, in addition to national joint industrial councils covering complete national industries, there should be formed also district councils and works committees. It was contemplated that the machinery should be decentralized, the district councils dealing with district matters within the limits laid down by a national council for the industry, and the works committees dealing in the same way with questions peculiar to the individual workshop or not of general concern. A fundamental condition affecting the formation of the councils was that the members should be chosen exclusively from the trade unions of the workpeople and the associations of the employers; this first report had reference only to well-organized industry, and the scheme outlined was not considered applicable where organization was weak or non-existent. Following its circulation to all the principal trade unions and employers’ associations, the report was adopted by the Government in Oct. 1917 as part of its industrial policy. At the same time the Government decided to recognize the industrial councils as standing consultative committees for their industries.

The Minister of Labour was charged with the duty of providing the industries with assistance in the formation of councils, and the first joint industrial council to be officially recognized was that formed in the pottery industry in Jan. 1918. The following list includes all the councils which had been officially recognized up to the end of Jan. 1921, at which time, however, 11 of the councils listed had more or less definitely broken down (these being marked by an asterisk). The operations of several others were intermittent, a principal reason for the failures being lack of adequate organization.
Asbestos manufacture
* Bread-baking (England and Wales)
Bread-baking (Scotland)
Bedsteads, metallic
Bobbin and shuttle manufacture
Boot and shoe manufacture
Building trades
Cable-making, electrical
Carpets
Cement
Chemicals, heavy
China clay
Civil service (administrative and legal departments)
Coir mat and matting
Cooperage
* Elastic webbing
Electrical contracting
Electricity supply
* Entertainments
Flour-milling
* Furniture
Gas mantles
Gas undertakings
Glass
Gloves
* Gold, silver and horological trades
Government industrial establishments
Heating and domestic engineering
Hosiery (English)
Hosiery (Scottish)
Insurance committees (National Health)
* Leather goods, made-up
Local authorities’ non-trading services (manual workers)
Local authorities’ non-trading services (manual workers) (Scotland)
Local authorities (administrative, technical and clerical)
Local authorities (administrative, technical and clerical) (Scotland)
Lock, latch and key
Match manufacture
* Music trades
Needles, fish-hooks and fishing-tackle
* Packing-case making
Paint, colour and varnish
Paper-making
Pottery
Printing
Process engraving
Quarrying
* Road transport
Rubber manufacture
* Sawmilling
Seed-crushing and oil-refining
Silk
Soap and candles
Spelter
Surgical instruments
Tin-mining
Tramways
* Vehicle-building
Wall-paper making
Waterworks undertakings
Welsh plate and sheet
Wire, iron and steel
Wool (and allied) textile (England and Wales)
Woollen and worsted (Scottish)
Wrought hollow-ware

In the formation of nearly all these 65 councils a main part taken by the Ministry of Labour, which arranged conferences and carried through the often difficult and prolonged work of negotiation between the various associations of employers or workpeople concerned. Of the 65, 20 were formed in 1918, 30 in 1919, and the remainder during the next 13 months.

On Oct. 18 1918 the Whitley Committee presented a second report on joint industrial councils (Cd. 9002). This recommended, for trades where organization was very weak or non-existent, an adaptation and expansion of the system of trade boards, working under an amended Trade Boards Act, and, in trades in which organization was considerable but not yet general, a system of joint councils with some Government assistance which might be dispensed with as the industries advanced to the stage of organization contemplated in the first report for joint standing industrial councils. The second, unlike the first report, was not completely adopted by the Government. In June 1918 a joint memorandum on the proposals contained in the second report was issued by the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Reconstruction. This memorandum emphasized the desirability of separating as completely as possible the trade board and the joint industrial council forms of organization, so as to develop the voluntary bodies only where the degree of organization warranted them, and the trade boards only where lack of organization made the statutory regulation of wages necessary.

In the meantime, for the purpose of consultation on questions of industrial reconstruction, it had been agreed by the Minister of Reconstruction, the Minister of Labour and the President of the Board of Trade that representative joint bodies should be formed on a less restricted basis than was contemplated in the first Whitley report. These interim industrial reconstruction committees, as the joint bodies were called, were begun to be established by the Ministry of Reconstruction in the beginning of 1918. They differed from joint industrial councils in that they were not intended to be permanent, and in that they were often formed in industries which had insufficient organization for joint industrial councils. They resembled joint industrial councils in being purely voluntary bodies and in the fact that their members were representatives of organizations of employers and workpeople. The formation of these interim committees did not violate the agreement as to policy contained in the joint memorandum referred to above, since the committees were formed primarily for special and temporary purposes, and were not meant to be permanent. It was contemplated that in some industries joint industrial councils would develop out of the interim committees as organization improved and, where organization remained weak, the existence of such a committee or any other voluntary body could not prejudice the power of the Minister of Labour to establish a trade board. A considerable number of such interim committees were formed. Several of these became joint industrial councils, some continued to operate as interim committees, while others had by 1921 ceased to exist, and in a number of the industries affected trade boards have since been formed.

The joint industrial councils have, for the most part, been formed on fairly uniform lines. A council is usually formed of equal numbers of members from the employers’ associations and from the trade unions connected with the industry. The normal rule as to the appointment of officers is that there should be a chairman and vice-chairman and two secretaries: if the chairman is a member of the employers’ side the vice-chairman is chosen from the trade-union side and vice versa, and a change in the side from which the chairman is chosen is made each second year. The secretaries are chosen usually one from each side. The two-sided character of the council is reflected in the rule commonly adopted in regard to voting: that no resolution shall be regarded as carried unless approved by a majority of the members present on either side. Usually in practice this means that decisions have to be arrived at by agreement. The councils generally have adopted not only uniform procedure but also a somewhat uniform statement of functions. The general object of a joint industrial council is often drafted in terms which indicate that it exists, to quote the final report of the Whitley Committee (Cd. 9153), to deal with all “matters affecting the welfare of the industry in which employers and employed are concerned,” and to care for “the progressive improvement of the industry as an integral part of the national prosperity.” In addition to such general statement of its functions, the constitution of a council usually includes, as more specific objects, the consideration of questions falling under such heads as the following: (a) wages, hours, working conditions, regulation of employment, machinery for settlement of differences; (b) improvement of health conditions in the industry, supervision of entry into and training for the industry; (c) extension of organization in the industry; (d) collection of statistics and information, encouragement of research and of invention, inquiry into special problems of the industry and publication of reports; (e) the formation of district councils and works committees; (f) the representation of the opinions of the industry to the Government and (g) coÃ¼peration with other councils in matters of common interest. In idea, therefore, the joint industrial councils are differentiated from the pre-war conciliation boards, which were usually confined, by their Constitutions , to questions of wage bargaining and the like. The number of members on a council varies from as much as 130 in the building trades council (which is exceptional also in several other respects) to 13 on the wall-paper manufacture council. Other councils range between this latter figure and 70 in the printing trades council, about 30 being a common membership. A few councils are differentiated from the others in that they do not concern themselves with negotiations on wages or hours of work or with the Settlement of Disputes ; the sub-title (building trades parliament) of the council of the building industry is meant to indicate the deliberative, as contrasted with the negotiatory, purposes for which this council was established. The conception of such trades parliament for the industry goes back to 1914.

The most important of the great national industries, which have attained the highest degree of organization,?-?e.g. coal-mining, iron and steel manufacture, cotton manufacture, engineering and iron founding,?-?had not adopted the Whitley scheme up to the early part of 1921. The industries in which councils have been formed vary from such national industries as those of building, printing, and wool manufacture to such small and localized industries as the manufacture of bedsteads, locks and latches, needles and fish-hooks. A large proportion of the industries are local in character, and it may be doubted whether some are more than sections of the industrial units for each of which the Whitley Committee meant a national industrial council to be formed. (The Whitley report did not, however, clearly define what it meant by an “industry.” ) Again, the trade or craft rather than the industrial basis has been adopted in one or two instances. The coopering joint industrial council is an example of this, the organization on both sides following craft lines and being on one side that of the skilled coopers and on the other side that of the employers of such coopers, whether or not master-coopers. The failure to form councils representative of industries rather than trades or crafts would appear to go further than this in so far that the interests represented on several of the councils are only the employers and the trade unions representing considerable sections of more or less homogeneous labour, but not all the occupations in the industry. This failure to realize the completely representative character of an industry is of interest from more than one point of view. It relates the councils to the well-established forms of pre-war conciliation machinery which have developed generally on a craft or occupational basis. It is important also from the point of view of those wider functions of a character other than wage bargaining which the councils have been expected to undertake. For this purpose it would appear to be necessary to have a body more completely representative than a joint industrial council usually is of all the interests in an industry. The constitution of a joint industrial council commonly allows for the coÃ¼ptation of expert members, and the building council has recently in this way made an addition of representatives of the associations of architects and architects’ assistants. This, however, is as yet unusual. Though various associations of managerial workers and technical experts have shown a desire to be represented on the councils there has been practically no development in this direction by either direct representation or coÃ¼ptation.

The Whitley scheme has been extended to services which are not ordinarily included under the term “industry.” A joint industrial council has been formed for the local authorities (administrative, technical and clerical staffs), covering on the employees’ side various grades of workers up to and including the higher officials, such as town clerks. For the civil service there is an elaborate scheme embracing all grades of civil servants in the administrative and legal departments. Various attempts, most of them unsuccessful up to the present, have been made by organizations of bank officers, insurance clerks, and other “black-coated” workers, to obtain the formation of councils for their professions. This extension of Whitley council machinery to services and professions outside the industrial sphere is a natural accompaniment of the growth of organization among non-manual workers, other results of which are to be seen in the establishment of various other forms of conciliation.

The formation of district councils as subsidiary bodies to national councils appears to have been effectively carried out on the lines proposed in the Whitley report only in a very few industries; a considerable number of the effective district councils are connected with the national councils which deal with services under the control of local authorities. The Whitley report further recommended works committees as part of the machinery, and the establishment of such committees as well as district councils has been systematically encouraged and assisted by the Ministry of Labour as part of the development of the Whitley scheme. Works committees were the subject of a separate report of the Committee on Relations between Employers and Employed (Cd. 9085), and at the request of that committee the Ministry of Labour made an inquiry into existing works committees in the winter of 1917-8 (Ministry of Labour Industrial Report No. 2). The number of works committees in existence throughout the country is small in relation to the number of industrial establishments of suitable size. Several of the joint industrial councils?-?e.g. those for the pottery and the iron and steel wire industries?-?have taken active steps to have such committees established in the works which were considered suitable, but little progress appears to have been made in some of the other industries which possess Whitley councils.

By far the largest bulk of the work done by the joint industrial councils has taken the form of the settlement of the rates of wages, hours of work, and similar questions. Agreements on such questions, some of them national agreements, have been arranged on the majority of the councils, and the formation of the councils has meant the introduction for the first time into some of the industries of systematic methods of collective bargaining.

Some councils have made reports on Education as affecting their industries, and others have dealt with such questions as conditions of safety in the works. The pottery council has conducted an inquiry into average earnings, costs and profits upon turnover. A report of the majority of a sub-committee of the building council, not adopted by the council, contained proposals for a radical alteration in the economic basis of the industry.

Other Bodies

The name “Industrial Council” has been applied in two important instances to bodies other than Whitley councils. In Oct. 1911, following upon the transport and other strikes of that year, an addition was made by the Government to the official machinery applicable by the Board of Trade to the working of the Conciliation Act of 1896. This took the form of an Industrial Council which consisted of 13 representatives of employers and the same number of representatives of workers, invited by the President of the Board of Trade to serve on the council with, as chairman, Sir George (afterwards Lord) Askwith who, at the same time, was appointed Chief Industrial Commissioner. This Industrial Council of 1911 was formed as a permanent body for inquiring into trade disputes and for taking action, without compulsory powers, by way of conciliation; that is, it was to be a national conciliation board. In this capacity the council came to very little, and subsequent action has proceeded along different lines. The council’s principal achievement was an inquiry into the subject of industrial agreements made at the request of the Government, the report on which was issued in 1913 (Cd. 6952). This contained a recommendation that, in certain conditions, the operation of a collective industrial agreement should be capable of extension by law so as to apply compulsorily not only to the signatories but also to a minority in the industry which had not been a party to the agreement. This recommendation, to which considerable objection has been taken, anticipated one of a similar nature contained in paragraph 21 of the first Whitley report.

The second important instance of the use of the name “Industrial Council,” otherwise than in connexion with Whitley councils, is more recent. As a result of a great industrial conference convened by the Government in Feb. 1919 a report (Cmd. 501, 1920), dealing with a variety of industrial problems, was prepared. This included a proposal for the formation of a National Industrial Council, or what may be described as an advisory “Parliament” of industry. The proposals as to the membership and objects of the council followed the lines adopted in the Whitley councils; but the National Industrial Council, consisting of 400 members fully representative of and duly accredited by the employers’ associations and the trade unions, was to speak for industry as a whole and on matters of general interest to all industry. It was pointed out that the council was to supplement and not to supersede any of the existing machinery; the general definition of its objects reads: “to secure the largest possible measure of joint action between the representative organizations of employers and workpeople and to be the normal channel through which the opinions and experience of industry will be sought by the Government on all questions affecting industry as a whole.” At the beginning of Jan. 1922 the council had not yet been formed.

History of Industrial Councils

History of Industrial Councils

History of Industrial Councils in the United Kingdom

Other Bodies

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