Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/551

 NOTES AND MEMORANDA 529 half-holiday without requiring, like the other eight-hour trades, to work off the three hours of the half-holiday on the other days of the week. No attempt was made to form any organisation of female operatives till 1882, when the Tailoresses' Union was established with the help of the Trades' Hall Council, and succeeded in getting a new and better price list for their work. A second women's organisation, the Asso- ciated Female Operatives, has been successfully established; but an attempt to found a domestic servants' union has failed, partly, it is aid, through want of energy in the character of the class, and partly through the opposition of the registry offices. The other two female societies, however, are flourishing, and they also have built themselves a stately mansion-house at a cost of 1,950, in which, like the male operatives, they keep up a round of social entertainments as well as business meetings. Probably the largest separate trade organisation in Australia is the Amalgamated Miners' Association of Australasia, which has its chief seat in the mining town of Creswick. It embraces all the Australasian colonies, and had in 1888 a total membership of 14,697, distributed as follows: Branches. Members. Victoria ... 31 ... 7,657 New South Wales 3 ... 4,502 Queensland ... 4 ... 1,842 Tasmania ... 2 ... 145 New Zealand ... 2 ... 551 The Association includes coal-miners as well as metal-miners, its nembership in New South Wales being almost entirely composed of fifteen lodges of colliers at Newcastle containing 4,100 members. Dr. Ruhland comes to the general conclusion from all the dta that have come before him that if not every fourth, certainly every fifth working man in Australia belongs to a trade union, and his conclusion is at all events supported by the statistics of the miners. According to the Census of 1881 there were 34,484 miners of all kinds in Victoria, and as we have seen 7,657 of them belonged to a union in 1888. The employers of Victoria, observing the strong and most effective support which individual trade unions obtained both in money and in advice from the Trades' Hall Council in industrial conflicts, founded the Victorian Employers' Union in 1885 for the purpose of securing to the employers the same advantage of united action which the trade unions already enjoyed, and of accumulating a fund for the support of individual employers on the occasion of strikes. It began with 70 members, and in 1887 it numbered over 300, including the leading firms in almost every industry in the colony. At first, at any rate, the coexistence of these two opposing organisations made for peace, and Mr. Bruce Smith, the first President of the Victorian Employers' Union, said in a speech from the chair of the Union in March 1887 that No. 3.--VOL. !  