The Coalition of Tradesmen

The Coalition is, essentially, the largest corporation in New Dunston. With a weighty collection of monopolies and trade agreements with organizations in both the grim and the cracks, the Coalition is a professional, disciplined organization. It gives its members less independence than other factions, preferring an explicit corporate hierarchy and clear policies. At the lower ranks, it attracts some of the less intelligent residents of the city, but also a surprising number of artists and even the occasional ritualist—people who want a straightforward, regular source of income so they can devote their free time to some other, less profitable pursuit.

Internal Structure

The Coalition is lead by a hereditary President advised by a Board of Directors. Most members of the Board also serve as Senior Vice Presidents, although by tradition the Coalition always has one person from another faction sit on the Board to provide an outside opinion. The half-dozen Senior Vice Presidents each oversee a single area that the Coalition works in, and tend to wield near total power over their unit. Most of these units were once independent factions which were eventually absorbed into the Coalition.

Most Senior Vice Presidents have one level of managers below them, with each manager overseeing several employees (the employees are a mix of Coalition members and members of other factions who work for the Coalition).

The Coalition makes no claim at all on what its members do outside of their job, and most have some sort of outside interest or hobby; since they're often willing to spend much of their income supporting it, this means someone from the Coalition is involved in just about everything in the city that isn't entirely controlled by another faction.

Relationships with Others

The Coalition is closely allied with the Steel Barons, as the other non-house in the Chamber of Lords, and the two often vote with House Creoda to form a relatively progressive voting bloc compared to the other members. Alone on the Chamber of Lords, the Coalition has pushed for expanding the number of seats.

The Coalition has business agreements with every other mercantile group in the city, even those they also compete with in other areas. Relations with the Businessman's Club and House Slattery are often tense due to competition, and there's an ongoing feud between the Coalition and the Dabrowski Initiative over pricing issues.

History

Originally, the Coalition of Tradesmen was an informal group of merchants and craftsmen who banded together in 1809 to share information and advance common interests. In 1818, partially in response to pressure from the Peerage to join like the Businessman's Club already had, they approached the other mercantile groups in the city and invited them to join.

The other groups were unwilling to become part of the Coalition, but a broader alliance was worked out, with a slightly more formalized Coalition as one of its founding members. The result was the Pittsburgh Trade Union. The Coalition received a large monopoly, on essentially any imports or exports not explicitly granted to another faction. At various times they have rented out portions of that to other factions, but they've always kept certain politically sensitive items, like weapons and ambrosia, under their direct supervision.

The Coalition has also absorbed several other groups, which helped make it the largest faction in the city in terms of membership. In 1839, the last independent faction in the city, the Weavers, Spinners, and Dyers merged with the Coalition. (For almost a century, the garments unit was one of the Coalition's largest. Since then, they've outsourced all their garment production, and it's now the smallest unit, handling a limited import/export business and handing the occasional custom order off to factories in the grim.)

In 1861, the corruption at the Builders Association of New Dunston became so serious that other Trade Union members openly discussed abolishing their monopoly simply because they needed access to reliable construction work; instead, an agreement was reached turning it into a unit of the Coalition, which put in outside managers and split up the employees in an ultimately successful effort to root out the corruption. And in 1925, when two of the three heirs of tiny House Ghirlandaio wanted to abandon their family farm, the Coalition bought them out and hired the third heir to run it. (The current Senior Vice President of the Coalition's agriculture unit is the child of the third heir.)