Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Russian Revolution (1921).pdf/49

 Clothing Trades, Treasury Workers, Medical & Sanitary Workers. The structural backwardness of our trade union movement, as compared with the Russian, may be seen from the fact that the American Federation of Labor, with only half as many members as the All-Russian Council of Trade Unions has them divided into five times as many separate national unions.

The industrial structure of the Russian trade union movement was not brought about by the sudden realization of a beautiful scheme worked out in the seclusion of some intellectual's study chamber—as American industrial unionists hope to accomplish the job here. It is the fruit of a gradual evolution, of a constant changing of the organizations to conform to the everyday needs and experiences of the workers. In the beginning the Russian movement developed the usual craft union types and weaknesses, although, of course, they were not so marked as in western countries. But the militants, working within the primitive unions, soon cleaned up the situation. They swept aside the reactionary officialdom and hammered the many craft union fragments into industrial unions, even as it is being done elsewhere in Europe at the present time. During the congress of 1920 a whole series of amalgamations were ordered, and the number of national industrial unions reduced from thirty-two to twenty-three. Nor is the evolution yet complete. It is planned to bring about still further amalgamations, to cut the number of unions to eighteen or fifteen, so that the workers can develop the greatest possible unity.

The organic bases of Russian trade unionism are the shop organizations. There are no local unions as we understand the term. The workers of each shop simply meet and transact what business they have, picking out a committee to represent them with the management and to carry on the union’s continuous activities. These are the famous shop committees, which have played such a prominent part in the revolution. From them come the delegates that make up the various local, district, state, and national committees and congresses of the trade unions.

The advantage of the shop organizations, with their elaborate shop committees, over the old-fashioned local unions comes from the fact that they are composed of the workers of only one plant and function right on