ABSTRACT
The shop stewards’ movement, and the workers’ committee movement which arose out of it, were wartime developments. In their brief hour of glory they seemed to promise—or to threaten—a fundamental transformation of Trade Union policy and methods of organisation. There had been, in a number of skilled trades, shop stewards long before the war. Naturally so; for a shop steward is simply a worker chosen by his fellow-workers in a particular workshop to represent them on matters peculiar to that workshop. What the ‘father of the chapel’ is to the printers, the shop steward is to the workers in any of a number of skilled factory trades, especially in the engineering and shipbuilding industries. The war-time strikes of the engineering and shipbuilding workers were in nearly all cases conducted under the influence of the shop stewards’ movement, and in defiance of the official Trade Union leadership.
