THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL AND ITS WORKS.
WE have never counted ourselves among the opponents of the London County Council. On the contrary, we have always admitted the value of its administrative work, and the impossibility that a body, suddenly invested with such large powers and necessarily inexpert in the use of them, should not make many mistakes and have a right to much allowance on that score. Nor have we associated ourselves with the complaints that have been made of its attitude towards tho labour question. That full recog- nition of Trade-Unions which has often been censured seems to us a wise policy. Many labour disputes would have been avoided if this recognition had been more frankly accorded by private employers. To quarrel with the intervention of Trade-Unions in labour controversies is to be blind to patent facts. We live in an age of organisations, and the employer who insists on making his own terms with his workmen irrespective of the Unions to which they belong writes himself down an anachronism. But the most up-to-date employer does not forget that he has his own interests to consult, and that the process of negotiation between him and the Unions is really an example of division of labour. The terms ultimately agreed upon are a resultant of two forces each bent upon doing the best it can for itself. We do not expect either the workmen or the employers to put the others' advantage before their own. It is enough if they keep in mind the fact that there are two parties to the agreement, and that the side which obstinately refuses to see that there is another party to be considered and, if possible, conciliated is likely in the long run to go to the wall. So far as the action of the London County Council is really open to complaint it is because they have occasionally forgotten this obvious principle. As repre- senting the ratepayers of London they are large em- ployers of labour, and their business is to obtain this labour on the best terms they can Their first object should be the interest of their principals. No regard they may have for the improvement of the workman's position —and they may rightly have a great deal—ought to take precedence of this commonplace duty. We do not ask them to shut their eyes to the changes which have taken place in the conditions of labour. On the con- trary, they ought to give them all the weight they deserve. But the most ample recognition of these conditions ought not to conceal from them the primary fact that as members of the London County Council they are buyers of labour, not sellers, and that in this character their business is to get it for their principals on the best terms they fairly can. Pay the Union rate of wages by all means,—that is the way, on the whole, to make sure of the best labour and to retain it with the fewest disputes. But in making their arrangements with the Unions the Council are bound to remember that in every negotiation there are two interests to be considered, and that this process will be most effectively carried out by the agents for each party looking after the interests of that party. The Progressives on the Council would unhesi- tatingly denounce as traitors the officials of a Union who boasted that the one question they had put to them- selves in making a bargain was, " What will be best for the employers ? " We do not see why the same condem- nation is not equally deserved by representatives of the ratepayers who boast that the one question they put to themselves in making a bargain was, " What will be best for the workmen ? "
It is this error that is at the bottom of the scandals that have come to light in the Works Committee. By general consent there have been no malpractices in the ordinary sense of the term,—no practices, that Is to say, designed to put money into the pockets of those guilty of them. In this respect Mr. Water- house's report is accepted as frankly by the minority of the Committee of Inquiry as by the majority. The "fabricated entries had no reference to any misap- propriation of money, nor did they conceal any action whereby any employ6 of the Department was pecuniarily advantaged." But all the same they were fabricated. They purported to show what the Department had spent on the several works in which it was engaged ; they showed, in fact, only the total sum which it had spent on these works in the aggregate. For purposes of comparison, therefore, the figures were wholly valueless. Supposing that the Council had wished to ascertain which of its undertakings was profitable and which was carried on at a loss—surely a point which it might reason- ably wish to have made clear—it would have had no means by which to arrive at a conclusion. What they would have had before them would have been simply " a. false statement as to the cost of the various works, the apparent cost of some being decreased by amounts which were included in the cost of the others." Both the majority and the minority of the Committee of Inquiry accept Mr. Waterhouse's state- ment as comprising all that there is to be said on the subject. Neither of them has anything to add. We con- fess that this finding seems to us to fall somewhat short of what is needed. A fault so grave as the falsification of accounts—an act which, if it were condoned, would certainly be repeated, and not always with such an absence of personal motive—deserved the strongest condemnation that the Committee could pass upon it. We suppose that they regard the offence as purged by the punishment meted out to the actual offenders. But the offence itself should have been described in the terms which properly belong to it, and no room left for any possible misunderstanding as to the light in which the Council regard it.
At this point the agreement between the Majority and Minority Reports practically comes to an end. The minority draw a sharp distinction between engineering and architectural works, the majority lump them together. The minority propose that the Works Committee shall be abolished, the majority would be content with reconstructing it. The minority would place the construction of all works undertaken by the Council under the Chief Engineer, the majority would leave the control where it is now, in the Works Committee. The ground of the distinction drawn between engineering and architectural works is to be found in the fact that in the former, as compared with the latter, there has been a saving " of more than half the contractor's profit—say more than £6,000 upon work costing £130,000." On the other hand, in architectural works there has been a loss which cannot be put at less than £10,000 upon a total of £220,000. The Majority Report denies this, but it does so with a careful abstinence from precise figures. " On the whole," it says, " it appears that the Works Department can execute architectural works of equal quality without loss, and with no greater charge than the Council would pay to contractors." What object there is in burdening the Council with under- takings of which the best that can be said in a very favourable Report is that they do not involve actual loss is not evident. We should have thought that the administration of London involved quite labour enough to make any addition to it inexpedient unless it can be shown to yield an appreciable saving to the ratepayers. That there are works which do this seems clear both from the figures quoted in the Minority Report and from the general agreement that engineering work, especially underground work, " can profitably be undertaken by a municipality."
The reason why, under these circumstances, the majority of the Committee of Inquiry recommend no substantial change in the organisation of the Works Department is plain. To do so would be to limit the powers and oppor- tunities of the Council in a way and to an extent which would lessen its importance as an employer of labour. The majority of the Committee will doubtless say that the retention of these powers and opportunities will enable the Council to try many interesting and important experiments. We are not concerned to deny the correct- ness of this statement. It is enough for us to question the object for which these experiments are undertaken, and the nature of the results expected from them. So far as we can see, neither the one nor the other has anything to do with the ratepayers of London. The object is to provide more employment at higher wages,— an excellent object in itself, but not one which the London County Council can properly make their own. If they were individual employers, spending their own money, we should watch such efforts with sympathy, if not with hope. But when the money these experiments demand is the money of the ratepayers, and the time and energy they demand is already heavily mortgaged for the ordinary work of London administration, we are forced to take a different view. The work of the community will be best done when each man does his own proper work as well as he can. To spend the ratepayers' money in trying experi- ments for other people's benefit is not, to our mind, an example of this commonplace but true maxim.
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