Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/72

 The congress of the union is held once a year; the representatives at this conference are elected at regional conference on the basis of strict proportion of one delegate to every 2,000 members. The Conference elects the central committee of the union. The regulations of the Congress and, in the interval between congresses, the regulations of the Central Committee are obligatory upon all the organs of the union and upon the members.

The union also allows the organisation of sections for those categories of labour the working conditions of which are to some extent peculiar, or to those who have comparatively recently entered into the organisation. These sections are organised in the form of elected subsidiary organs attached to the general trade union but they have not the right to carry out any independent resolutions without the sanction of the union, nor can they have separate funds. In the whole national union there is only one engineers' section; in some local organisations there are sections of workers working in gold, silver and platinum, or there are also sections of workers working in electrical undertakings. There are no other sections at the present moment. The metal workers' union is in this manner one complete organisation, strongly welded by the common interests of the metal working industry.

This structure of the metal workers' union was developed in the process of prolonged organisation work, and found it expression in the rules of the union organs accepted at the second Congress of the Union.

There are three questions which are of the greatest interest in the development of the organisation; these are: (1) the relations between the factory committees and the union, (2) the regional organisations, (3) the inclusion of engineers in the unions. (Note: the engineers referred to here are the higher engineers and not the mechanics).

The first question stood out very sharply in the period directly after the October Revolution when the factory committees and the unions were faced with the same problem in the sphere of organising production, namely, to replace the overthrown governing authority of capital by a new directing order.

The conditions were too new; there had been no previous experience; therefore hesitation and experimenting were inevitable. But the new problems before the trade unions—problems compelling them to shift the centre of gravity of their labours to the sphere of economic construction—made it essential for all the economic institutions of the proletariat to fuse into a single organisation; a form of organisation was found which fused all the organising forces into one; the factory committees were converted into the embryo of the union, the unit of its organisation. The experience of more than two years' work has sufficiently justified this form.

The second question in the sphere of organisation had both a practical and theoretical significance. Its practical significance lay in the fact that in such a tremendous territory as Russia it was difficult to construct rapidly a centralised union.