Conclusion

In the introduction the tasks of trade unions, of the Labour movement in general, has been described as maintaining and improving the working conditions, and subsequently the living conditions, of the workers. This task may grossly be divided in an industrial and a political part. Under the industrial part one may include the negotiations of agreements with employers and all that belongs to collective bargaining, grievance procedure, strike action, the use of arbitration and so on. Joint consultation and participation in management would also come within this category.

The mere fact that the early trade unions challenged the unilateral rule of employers - up to then that was quite legitimate - meant a challenge of the existing order. In other words, the struggle of the trade unions to be recognised as the representatives of workers, was right from the start a political struggle. So, before trade unions could fully play their industrial role, before they could take up collective bargaining with employers or settling disputes, etc., they had to be recognised as such. As a result, employers had to give up some of their managerial prerogatives. This process did not go very peacefully. Trade unions often had to show their strength before they were accepted as the spokesmen for the workers. It was a maturing process - not only for unions as is often assumed - but for employers as well. This process of transforming society has not come to an end yet; many unions still want to extend their influence, their say in a whole range of industrial, economic matters, in which their involvement has not been accepted yet. Therefore, but for a lot of more practical reasons as well, unions participate in party politics, and in 'pressure group’ activities - as campaigns, delegations, lobbying or sitting in governmental advisory committees.

How far does this ‘inherent desire’ to transform society of trade unionism go? The expectations of the Italian Marxist, A. Gramci, were very low:
Trade unionism is evidently nothing but a reflection of capitalist society, not a potential means of transcending society. It organises workers, not as producers but as wage-earners, that is as creation of the capitalist system of private property, as sellers of their labour power. Unionism unites workers according to the tools of their trade or the nature of their product, that is according to the contours imposed on them by the capitalist system.

Without speculating about the power of trade unionism to transcend capitalist society, one can argue that if its purpose is more than the mere protection of the material interests of its mernbers, if, in fact, trade unionists have set before themselves the positive aim of winning, through thei r unions, self-government in industry, than there can be no doubt, that industrial unionism is the right structure. As G.D.H. Cole pointed out, craft unions, based on process and not on product, cannot make any effective claim to control industry. They have not the strength to combat the vast aggregations of capital, they load esaentially to dissension in the workers’ ranks, and they enable the employer to play off one set of workers against another.

The unions affiliated to the Triple Alliance all believed in the superiority of industrial unionism over craft or occupational unionism. They, too, were interested in more than the mere protection of their members. As J.H. Thomas once pointed out, they were dissatisfied with a system of society, in which labour-power was treated as a mere commodity, and they, therefore, demanded that they should become real partners in industry, jointly sharing in the determination of working oonditions and management. How did they propose to bring this about, however? Despite all its weaknesses, Syndicalism had a more or less coherent theory concerning this. The leaders of the Alliance rejected this theory, but did not replace it with another coherent view. The constituent bodies and their leaders, had all their individual ideas about social change, and virtually no attempts were made to bring more coherence in them.

In relation to the Sankey Comrnission, B.C. Hoberts remarked, that if the miners had signed the chairman's report, they would have been in a strong position to press the Government to nationalise the mines. That they did not -  Roberts argued - was mainly due to the ‘naïve optimism’ of Smillie, who was firmly convinced that capitalism would collapse within five years, and that the mines would then be taken over by the miners. It was - according to Roberts — from the miners’ point of view unnecessary to compromise on principle, when one could remain true to one’s faith in the certainty of success. A certain naive optimism can also be detected by R. Williams. He dedicated his book The New L abour Outlook - published in April 1921, the month in which the Alliance collapsed – ‘to the Children of this and all other Nations, including our own darling boy, 'Vanya’, in the knowledge that before they reach manhood and womanhood the Fight for Socialism will be definitely won’.

Not only regarding the nationalization of the mines, and the eventual victory of Socialism, the Triple Alliance leaders had a somewhat 'naïve optimism’, the whole Triple Alliance might be described as a naive enterprise. The idea of a Triple Alliance emerged from the chequered experiences of the miners, the railway men and the transport workers in 1911 and 1912. They found that if one industry was on strike, in the other two industries people were laid off, or in those industries people were acting as strike-breakers. So, the idea of a Triple Alliance emerged from an attempt to limit these consequences. The 'Founding Fathers', however, hoped that the Alliance would play a more active part - the active assistance of each other in the pursuance of their demands. What this meant for its organisation, the leaders never fully realised. It was clear, right from the beginning, that the ultimate power of the Alliance laid in the possibility, that it might call a strike, in which all their members would be involved. A national strike in the mining, the railway and the transport industries would dislocate all other industrial activities, and would come very close to a general strike. If such a strike would take a Government by surprise, if the Government would be unprepared, a revolutionary situation would exist. Evidently, any Government with a knife on the throat would not take the odd chance, that the knife actually would be used. It would handle this situation with care, and - in the meantime - take some precautionary measures to make the knife ineffective. The leaders of the Triple Alliance were naive in that they rejected revolution, but did not realise that they, thereby discarded their ultimate weapon. They were naive as well in that they could enter into a viable organisation, without giving that organisation a purpose of its own. Lastly, they were naive in believing that you could command union members into a fight for the sake of another group of workers, without preparation.

After Black Friday, G.B.H. Cole said about the leaders of the Triple Alliance:
These leaders, more from lack of foresight and imagination than from any other cause, took things easy, or busied themselves with small affairs, when should have been straining every nerve to prepare for the coming struggle. The result was that the slump towards the end of 1920 took them altogether unprepared. As they had no policy for taking advantage of favourable conditions, they had none for bearing up against unfavourable conditions. And, conscious of their own helplessness and lack of ideas for dealing with the situation, and of the panic which was laying hold of them, they attributed helplessness and panic to the rank and file in an even higher degree.

From 1914 to 1920, G.D.H. Cole stated, the union leaders struck a good deal. They made plans for a gradual advance in the industrial and social status of Labour, all unconscious that a change was speedily coming in the material situation to sweep all the gains of the post-war period away, and to force the workers back int o a more degraded condition than ever.

The opportunist policy of the unions, in which they relied wholly on their industrial strength, proved to be self-defeating. Although one might speculate, whether any other policy would have been more successful, one can detect two possible alternatives. The one would have meant a confrontation with the Government, and a 'war against capitalism’. This would demand - as G.D.H. Gole pointed out - real working class education, not merely classes and lectures, but the turning of every possible trade union branch into a centre of Socialist planning and discussion - a place in which the strategy of the next phases of the struggle would have been worked out by the rank and file themselves. Additionally, one could bring home to the minds of the workers both the magnitude of the resistance which they would encounter, and the strength which their own rnovement would be capable of exercising against that resistance. The other policy would require less preparation; it would mean the acceptance of the opportunities for negotiation, consultation and co-operation with the employers and the government. The leaders of the Triple Alliance rejected both policies. They did not want to prepare their rank and file for that. This was not so remarkable. For, although the living and working conditions of their members were far from ideal, they had more to lose than just ‘their chains’. As the figures in the appendices show, after the war till 1920, the wages rose faster than the cost of living; and after 1920 the cost of living declined faster than the wages.

At the risk of exaggeration, one might argue that their members had never been so well-off before. But not only their members had something to lose, the leaders were 'better-off’ as well. They were consulted by the Government, some of them even obtained positions in the ranks of the Government, and had the impression that they could influence the Government in a favourable direction. It is, therefore, remarkable that they still adopted an antagonistic policy, and rejected a National Industrial Conference (council), which might have been - apart from the true motives of the Government - a real alternative. The consequence of this attitude was, that the Triple Alliance did not prepare for a confrontation, while they themselves manoeuvred in a position, in which a confrontation almost was inevitable. The leaders did not realise this, and found the Government prepared, when they called a strike in April 1921.

The Triple Alliance was meant to be complementary to the TUC, the Labour Party, and the GFTU, and the constituent bodies. In fact, it was not. The TUC was considered weak, despite that the Alliance referred matters of interest for all workers to the bodies that represented Labour in general. The matters that were left, were matters that could be dealt with by the individual unions. Since the Alliance had no grievances of its own, the power of the Alliance has only been used to back up demands of the individual unions. Which opened the absurd possibility, that industry would be paralysed over a mere sectional dispute. The conclusion must be, that the Triple Alliance was an enterprise without a strategy and an organisation, that did not serve any purpose. Organisations like that must fail.

The failure of the Triple Alliance added urgency to search for more effective means of securing joint action in industrial disputes. One answer was felt to lie in the TUC, which, more than fifty years after its foundation, still had little real co-ordinating power. After the 1919 Railway strike, a Commission prepared an alteration of the TUC-Constitution. Its proposals were implemented after Black Friday. The old executive, the Parliamentary Committee, was replaced by a much more powerfull body, the General Council, authorised, among other things, to promote co-ordinated action in industrial disputes. These powers the General Council used in the 1926 General Strike. Like the threatened Triple Alliance strike of April 1921, union leaders argued, that this was just an industrial dispute, not a Political one. It showed that the lesson of the Triple Alliance still had to be learned.