Part 18

One expression of the employers' approach is the tender of contracts identical to the last farthing. Britain in 1955 lost the contract for the Snowy River hydroelectric plant in Australia largely because the eight British firms among the twenty that submitted tenders all submitted exactly the same amount. In New Zealand nineteen out of twenty-six companies bidding for an electric-cable contract submitted identical figures.

The practice is embedded in British industry. Legislation to combat it was introduced into the House of Commons in 1956, but objective experts on the subject believed the legislation fell far short of the drastic action necessary.

Restrictive practices are only too evident in the larger field of relations between the worker and the boss. The importance of problems in this area of conflict is multiplied by their political implications and by the fact that Britain, like other countries, is entering a new period of industrial development. The industrial use of nuclear energy for power and the advent of automation can produce a new industrial revolution in the homeland of the first industrial revolution. But this cannot improve the British economy--indeed, the revolution cannot really get under way as a national effort--without greater co-operation between organized labor and employers and managers.

Throughout this book there have been references to organized labor and to the Trades Union Congress. Now we encounter them in the special field of industrial relations.

Organized labor in Britain is big. There are 23,000,000 people in civil employment, and of these over 9,000,000, nearly the whole of the industrial labor force, are union members. They have an enormous influence on the economic policy of any British government; they are, according to Sir Winston Churchill, "the fourth arm of the Estate"; in the view of Mr. Sam Watson, the tough, capable leader of the Durham miners, they are "the largest single organism in our society."

But organized labor is not a single force, an orderly coalition of unions. It is an extraordinary mixture. Politically some of its leaders are well to the right of the left-wing Tories although they vote Labor. One important union and a number of smaller ones are dominated by Communists. The Transport and General Workers Union has 1,300,000 members; the National Amalgamated Association of Nut and Bolt Makers has 30. Some unions are extremely democratic in composition. Others are petty dictatorships. Many are not unions in name. If you are civil-service clerk, for instance, or even a member in good standing of the Leeds and District Warp Dressers, Twisters and Kindred Trades, you join an association.

The Trades Union Congress is the most powerful voice in British labor. Only 186 of about 400 unions are affiliated with it, but as these 186 include almost all the larger ones, the TUC represents nearly 8,000,000, a majority of the country's union members.

The outsider's idea of the typical trade-unionist is a horny-handed individual in a cloth cap and a shabby "mac." But there are 1,500,000 white-collar workers, including 500,000 civil servants, among the unionists affiliated with the TUC.

The tendency of the white-collar workers to affiliate with the TUC probably will continue. In March of 1956 the London County Council Staff Association decided to apply for affiliation. We can expect that the clerical workers in this type of union will exert increasing influence within the TUC and upon its Council. The TUC's claim to represent the industrial working class thus is being watered down by the admission of the white-collar workers' unions. As this class of worker generally believes that the industrial workers' pay has risen disproportionately and that inflation has hurt the office worker more than it has the industrial worker, the new composition of the TUC may produce sharp internal differences. At any rate, the old position of the TUC as the spokesman only for the industrial worker is a thing of the past.

The TUC is a powerful voice. But it is only a voice. It has great responsibilities and little formal power. It can, for instance, attempt to moderate demands for higher wages and urge restraint, but it cannot prevent any union from pressing such demands. The TUC can advise and conciliate when a strike begins, but it cannot arbitrarily halt one. When two member unions are in a dispute--and such disputes can seriously damage both the national economy and labor's position in British society--the TUC can intervene, but too often its intervention is futile. Each union is self-governing. The TUC's influence, nonetheless, is enormous. The restraint shown by the major unions after the war and during the war on the question of wage increases was largely due to the influence of the TUC. The general growth of responsibility on the part of many unions can also be attributed, to a great extent, to the missionary work of the TUC.

In recent years the General Council of the TUC has moved toward assuming a stronger position in the field of industrial strikes. It has tried to show the workers that the strike is a two-edged sword that wounds both worker and employer. The TUC maintains that the strike, the workers' great weapon, should not be used indiscriminately because of the damage a strike by one union can do to other unions and to the national economy.

At the 1955 TUC conference the General Council won acceptance of a proposal that it intervene in any case of a threatened strike when negotiations between the employers and the unions seem likely to break down, throwing the members of other unions out of work or endangering their wages, hours, and conditions. This is a significant step forward. Formerly the TUC could move only after negotiations had broken down and a deadlock had been reached. In other words, the TUC acted only at the moment when both sides were firmly entrenched.

But this advance does not improve organized labor's position in regard to the problem of restrictive practices, a problem that is as serious as strikes or threats of strikes.

The _Daily Mirror_ of London, that brash, vigorous tabloid which is the favorite newspaper of the industrial working class, published an inquiry into the trade unions in 1956. Its authors, Sydney Jacobson and William Connor, who conducts the column signed "Cassandra," traced the origin of restrictive practices back to 1811, when bands of workers known as the Luddites broke into lace and stocking factories and smashed the machinery. "The suspicion toward new methods has never entirely died out in this country," they wrote, "and although sabotage of machinery is rare (but not unknown) the protests have taken a new direction--the slowing down of output by the men themselves and the development of a whole series of practices that cut down the production of goods and services."

Any reader of the British press can recall dozens of instances of restrictive practices by labor. One famous one concerned the floating grain elevator at Hull, an east-coast seaport. This elevator, which cost £200,000 ($560,000), was kept idle for two months because the Transport and General Workers Union insisted that it should be worked by twice as many men as the Transport Commission thought necessary. The Transport Commission, incidentally, represented a nationalized industry.

And there was the union that fined a milkman £2 for delivering milk before 7:30 a.m.

The unions are quick and brutal in their punishment of those who break their rules. Indeed, today, when there is full employment and the unions generally enjoy a prosperity and power undreamed of by their founders, they are more malicious than in the old days when they were fighting for their rights. The principal weapon against an offending worker is to "send him to Coventry." No one speaks to him; he eats and walks home alone. Ronald Hewitt, a crane-driver, endured this for a year. He had remained at work, obeying his union's rules, when his fellow workers, who belonged to another union, went out on strike. Hewitt was a person of unusual mental toughness. Another worker sent to Coventry committed suicide.

Many of these punishments are the outcome of situations in which unofficial strikes send out the workers. Those who remain and who are punished are accused of being "scabs" because they obey the union's rules.

All union leaders publicly acknowledge the great importance of increased productivity in British industry. But the methods of boosting productivity often seem to some union leaders to strike at the principles for which they have fought so long. For instance, an increase in output is regarded by the veterans solely as a traditional means of increasing the profits of the employers. Moreover, increases in productivity often involve the introduction of new machines and layoffs for some workers. To the short-sighted, appeals for greater productivity thus seem calls to smash the job security that is the fetish of the industrial working class. This sort of union leader just does not seem to grasp, or to want to grasp, the principle that increased productivity is a general good benefiting workers, employers, and unions.

Efficiency is not the sole god of British industry, as is evident when one studies the weird system known as "demarcation" in the shipbuilding industry. To install a port light under this system requires the labor of a shipwright to mark the position of the light, a caulker to indicate and make the hole for the light, another driller to make the surrounding holes, and another caulker to fix the bolts and chain. In addition, a foreman for each of the trades supervises the operation. Interunion disputes arising out of such unnecessarily complicated operations frequently result in a stoppage of work and a delay in the filling of export contracts.

The most alarming example occurred at Cammell Laird's, a shipbuilding company, in 1955 and lasted until well into 1956. New ships were being built--for dollars--and the strike began over a difference between woodworkers and sheet-metal workers. The new vessels were to have aluminum facing in the insulation. Formerly the woodworkers had done this sort of work, and they claimed rights over the new job. But the sheet-metal workers said that, as aluminum was metal, the job was theirs. The two groups and management finally reached an agreement. Then the drillers of the Shipwrights' Union entered the affair and a new strike developed.

The construction of the ships was delayed for six months and more. The ability of Cammell Laird's or other British shipyards to offer foreign buyers a firm date for completion of ships became a matter of doubt. About 400 workers were dismissed as redundant. About 200 strikers found work elsewhere. Thousands of other jobs were jeopardized. There was not the slightest indication that those who inspired the strike took much account of its effects on their country's future.

As a result of the application of the demarcation principle in shipyards--you drill holes in wood, we drill holes in aluminum--wage costs are often as much as 6 per cent higher than normal.

The innate conservatism of union leaders and the rank and file in shipyards, industrial plants, and factories has been proof against the missionary work of critics extolling the far different approach of American labor. The leaders are often unmoved by figures which show that increased productivity by the American labor force has resulted in a far greater national consumption. In many cases neither the union leader nor the union member will accept the idea that new machines and new methods mean more efficient production, lower costs, and higher wages.

British union leaders often counter that the American worker has no memory of unemployment and depression. This is, of course, untrue. Indeed, in many instances political and economic it seems that British labor has made too much of its experiences, admittedly terrible, in the depression of two decades ago. American labor, by eagerly accepting new processes and machines, has attempted to insure itself against the recurrence of a depression. British labor has not.

Industrial disputes affect the British economy's ability to meet the challenge of the new industrial revolution. Disputes between union and union are especially important. In 1955 there were three national strikes. All were complicated by interunion friction.

Another complicating factor in industrial relations is the slow disappearance, under the pressure of increased mechanization, of the system of wage differentials in British industry. These differentials represented a reasonable difference between the wages of skilled and unskilled workers. With their disappearance, skilled workers in one industry have found themselves earning less money than unskilled workers in another. One cause is the ability of the big "general" unions to win wage increases. Another is the practice of demanding wage increases solely on the basis of the rising cost of living.

Naturally the disappearance of differentials has led to hot disputes among workers and unions. In this atmosphere it is difficult for either the union leaders or the employers to urge increased productivity and harder work. "Everyone is furious with everyone else," an industrialist in the Midlands said. "They start with me, but they are pretty mad at each other, too."

In this interminable war between labor and management, the former wields a weapon of enormous potency--the strike. Labor acknowledges its disadvantages, but the right to strike is fiercely guarded. The whispered suggestion that strikes might be made illegal unites the labor movement as does nothing else. Labor needs the strike as its ultimate weapon: the hydrogen bomb of British industrial relations. And because of the peculiar economic conditions in Britain, the employer finds himself almost weaponless. He can still dismiss an unsatisfactory employee, if he has a good reason and can convince the employee's union that it _is_ a good reason. But dismissal does not mean much in an era of full employment.

Right-wing critics on both sides of the Atlantic have contended for a decade that British economic difficulties are rooted in strikes and other industrial disturbances. There is something in this, but, as H.L. Mencken would have said, not much.

From 1946 through 1954 the days lost through strikes in Britain ranged from a low of 1,389,000 in 1950 to a high of 2,457,000 in 1954. Due to strikes in the newspaper and railroad industries and on the docks, 1955 was an exceptionally bad year: 3,794,000 working days were lost. The figures look big, and of course it would have been much better for Britain if they were half as large. But let's put them into perspective. The figure for 1955, admittedly high, represents a loss of less than one day's work per man in every five years' employment. The loss to production through industrial accidents is eight times as high.

Both sides know that a strike is a costly business: costly to labor, to management, to the union, to the nation. In many cases the threat of a strike has been enough to force the employers to give way. Inevitably, the higher cost of production resulting from the new wage rates is passed on to the consumer. The merry-go-round of rising prices, rising wages, and rising costs spins dizzily onward. Overseas the buyer who is choosing between a Jaguar or a Mercedes finds that the price of the former has suddenly risen, so he buys the German car rather than the British one. This is what the economists mean when they warn British labor and industry about pricing themselves out of the export market.

As we have seen, the industrial worker is doing pretty well in Britain, even if the rise in prices is taken into consideration. The average weekly earnings for all male adult workers, according to the records kept by the Ministry of Labor, show a rise from £3 9_s._ 0_d._ in 1938 to £10 17_s._ 5_d._ in 1955--an increase of 215 per cent. The coal-miners who were earning £3 2_s._ 10_d._ in 1938 are now earning a weekly wage of £13 18_s._ 6_d._ The figure does not represent wealth by American standards, for it amounts to approximately $38.99. But it is high pay by British standards, and when the low cost of subsidized housing and the comparatively low cost of food are taken into account it will be seen that the British miner is living very well.

The miner's view is that he does a dirty, dangerous job, that he has never been well paid before, and that if a union does not exist to win pay rises for its members, what good is it? The miners and the union members in the engineering industry belong to strong unions able to win wage increases by threats of a strike. Once these increases are granted, other smaller unions clamor for their share of wage rises. The merry-go-round takes another turn.

Government attempts to urge restraint, through the TUC, upon the unions customarily fall afoul of the snag that each union believes that it is a special case and that although other unions can postpone their demands for higher wages until next year, it cannot. So one union makes a move and the whole business begins again. If the increase is not granted, there is a strike or a threat of a strike. The national economy suffers, class antagonism increases, and export production is delayed. For such is the interdependence of the British industrial machine and so great is the drive for exports that any industrial dispute that reaches the strike stage inevitably affects exports.

A modern strike is like a modern war. No one wins and everyone loses. A classic case is the Rolls-Royce strike of 1955, which involved not only employers and union labor but, eventually, the Roman Catholic Church and the Communist Party. The cause of the strike was a conflict between restrictive practices and a stubborn workman named Joseph McLernon, who worked at the Rolls-Royce factory at Blantyre in Scotland as a polisher of connecting rods.

The workers in Joe's shop feared that, in view of reduced work, some of their number might be let out. So they agreed to share their work by limiting bonus earnings to 127 per cent of the basic rate. McLernon, however, refused to limit his overtime. He polished as long and as hard as ever and refused the assistance of another worker. For this, McLernon was reprimanded by his union, the General Iron Fitter's Association.

Joe had been working for Rolls-Royce for twelve years. The firm is considered a good employer. But its managers were men of conviction. They objected to the union picking on Joe and said so. Three months later the union expelled McLernon.

Enter the Communists with many an agonizing cry about the solidarity of labor. They demanded that Rolls-Royce fire McLernon on the grounds that he no longer belonged to the union. The employers refused, and immediately all the other polishers stopped work. Joe kept right on. By the end of the day the entire factory labor force of 600 men was out on strike.

The Amalgamated Engineering Union's local branch then entered the picture. After a few days another 7,500 workers at the Hillington and East Kilbride factories had struck.

Was it a strike? Certainly, said the General Iron Fitter's Association. The Electrical Trades Union, dominated by Communists, recognized the strike as official in accordance with its rule of recognizing all strikes involving electricians as official until they are declared otherwise. The Amalgamated Engineering Union, after much soul-searching, decided to back the strike and approved strike pay for its members. Negotiations between the Employers' Federation and a committee representing the various unions got nowhere.

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow then issued a pastoral letter warning the workers against Communism. McLernon is a Catholic. But so were many of the workers who wanted him fired.

The strike dragged on for seven weeks. The strikers lost over £700,000 ($1,960,000) in wages. By the time the strike was over, no one on the strikers' side could disentangle the objectives of the various groups that had called it. Rolls-Royce export contracts were delayed. The Royal Air Force failed to get delivery on time of some important machines. Other industries also involved in the export trade and in national defense were slowed down. The unions had maintained solidarity at a tremendous cost. But when the strike collapsed, Joe McLernon was still at his job, polishing away. He alone could be termed a winner. Rolls-Royce, the unions, industry, and the nations were losers.

The Communist intervention in the Rolls-Royce strike symbolized its current role in Britain. This is to win control of key positions in the British unions so that the Communist Party will be able to paralyze British industry in the event of an international crisis or a war. To achieve this ultimate objective, the Communists obviously intend to establish a stranglehold on the communications and defense industries.

This is the real Communist danger in Britain. Active political campaigning by the Communist Party has been fumbling, misdirected, and notably unsuccessful. Neither the old colonel from Cheltenham who classes the sprightly dons of the Labor Party with "those damned Bolshies" nor the Bible Belt Congressman who confuses British Socialist politicians with Russian Communists is on the right track. The danger of Communism in Britain lies in the unions. So does the defense against the danger.

The pattern of Communist success is uneven. Communists lead the Electrical Trades Union, ninth-largest in the country, with a membership of about 215,000. Because electricity is everywhere in modern industry the union's members are everywhere. And although probably not more than one in every sixty members of the ETU is a member of the Communist Party, the party completely runs the union.

Here is a curious sidelight on Communist methods. The ETU is weak financially, perhaps the poorest of the ten largest unions. But it spends money freely on "education." The ETU has its own Training College at Esher, where its more ambitious members can be trained to further the interests of the Communist Party and to silence the voices of critics and doubters. Although the non-Communist members of the ETU consider the college as a valuable device for the advancement of the worker, the institution plainly is a training school for Communists and their creatures in their prolonged war against the British economy.

One of the basic concepts of British Socialism is the solidarity of the working class. Acceptance of this concept makes it difficult for the industrial worker to think of the Communist, who comes from the same town, speaks with the same accent, wears the same clothes, as an enemy. There is a pathetic ingenuousness about workers who try to tell the visitor that the Communists "are just the same sort of blokes as us except they've got a different political idea."

The _Daily Mirror_ team in its portrayal of the trade unions devoted a chapter to "The Communist Challenge." Significantly, a large part of the chapter provided an incisive and illuminating illustration of just how the Communists move to gain control of a union.

Where else are the Communists strong? They are in control in some areas of the National Union of Mineworkers. Arthur Horner, the Secretary of the Union, is a Communist. But they are being fought hard in the NUM by men like Sam Watson, who heads its Durham region.

The connection in the Communist mind between the control of the NUM and the ETU is obvious. Control of these two unions would enable Communists to halt the flow of coal and electric power to Britain's factories. Not much more is needed to cripple a nation's economy.