LECTURE NO. 1
The World’s Trade Union Movement Before and After the War
Geography of the Trade Union Movement
IN order to understand the development and the ways of the world trade union movement in the post-war period, we will have to give a short characterization of its conditions before and during the war.
Before the war the trade union movement could be characterized as follows, first of all from the geographical point of view it was not yet a world movement; it was mostly developed in Europe and in the Anglo Saxon countries, and on the other hand in the British colonies, such as Canada, Australia, South Africa. All Asia without mentioning Africa—this great area of working masses—which by its population is much greater than the so-called civilized world, had not been drawn into the world's socialist nor into the world's trade union movement, for the simple reason that the labor movement began to crystalize in these countries only at the end of the war and mainly in the post-war period. So from the geographical point of view we have a trade union movement which is confined within a certain territorial frame, which can only be called a world movement with certain reservations.
Trade Union Statics
In the whole world before the war there were about ten million organized workers, which were organized into unions of all kinds of political shades, beginning with anarcho-syndicalists and ending with Catholic, democrat, Protestant and so forth. The bulk of these organized workers were in Europe. Taking the main countries we get the following picture: Before the war in Great Britain in round numbers were about 4,000,000 organized workers; in Germany, about 3,500,000; in the United States, 2,700,000; in France, about 1,000,000; in Italy, 900,000; in Belgium, 200,000; in Holland, 220,000, etc., etc. We will stop with these figures in order to show the real value, to show what they really contain.
France before the war was showing 1,000,000 members in the trade unions; but in the General Confederation of Labor, the only organization which could be called a class organization, there were no more than 500,000. The rest were unions of agricultural workers which stood on the other side of the national trade union movement—almost on the other side; unions of government employees, which in fact were in opposition to the CGT; here we also find some little yellow unions; in
