Directions: There are 4 passages followed by some questions or unfinished statements, you should answer the questions or decide on the best choice on the Answer Sheet.

Passage 4

An industrial society, especially one as centralized and concentrated as that of Britain, is heavily dependent on certain essential services, electricity supply, water, rail and road transport, the harbors. The area of dependency has widened to include removing rubbish, hospital and ambulance services, and, as the economy develops, central computer and information services as well. If any of these services ceases to operate, the whole economic system is in danger.

It is this interdependency of the economic system that makes the power of trade unions such an important issue. Single trade unions have the ability to cut off many economic blood supplies. This can happen more easily in Britain than in some other countries, in part because the labor force is highly organized. About 55 per cent of British workers belong to unions, compared to under a quarter in the United States. For historical reasons, Britain’ s unions have tended to develop along trade and occupational lines, rather than on an industry-by-industry basis, which makes wage policy, democracy in industry and the improvement of procedures for fixing wage levels difficult to achieve.

There are considerable strains and tensions in the trade union movement, some of them arising from their outdated and inefficient structure. Some unions have lost many members because of industrial changes. Others are involved in arguments about who should represent workers in new trades. Unions for skilled trades are separate from general unions, which means that different levels of wages for certain jobs are often a source of bad feeling between unions. In traditional trades which are being pushed out of existence by advancing technologies, unions can fight for their members’ disappearing jobs to the point where the jobs of other union’ s members are threatened or destroyed. The printing of newspapers both in the United States and in Britain has frequently been halted by the efforts of printers to hold on their traditional highly- paid jobs.

Trade unions have problems of internal communication just as managers in companies do, problems which multiply in very large unions or those which bring workers in very trade union officials have to be reelected regularly, others are elected, or even appointed, for life. Trade union officials have to work with a system of “shop stewards” in many unions, “shop stewards” being workers elected by other workers as their representatives at factory or works level.