The Customers Can Wait
o hell with the customers! We've got a strike I to win, and they can wait till we've won it.' The sentiment is not without precedent. What made it remarkable in the airport dispute last weekend was that it represented not the view of the strikers, but the attitude--although a very much unspoken one—of the two public air corporations, BEA and BOAC. Faced with the most irresponsible and fatuous kind of un- official action imaginable—a four-hour 'token' strike by airport engineers only forty-eight hours before they were to receive an answer to their wage claim—the employers, after an advance warning, handed out suspension notices to all concerned—which meant the docking of a day's pay, a penalty enforced with Shylockian deter- mination.
In Manchester, this entailed keeping de-
layed passengers on the ground for an extra night after the strikers had said they were willing to go back to work. In London, it caused BEA: services to be suspended again for a whole after- noon so that one shift of engineers could serve out the last three hours of their sentence. And it was driven home, when the wage negotiations took place, by a steadfast refusal to give the,,,, engineers a penny more than they had been'- offered before the strike.
All this is admirable. The willingness of the air corporations to inconvenience their passen- gers and to lose money (even if at a carefully chosen slack period of the year) rather than to submit to bullying by unconstitutional behaviour represents the kind of stand that has been needed for a long time. It has been needed particularly at London Airport, where the inquiry which fol- lowed the BOAC engineers' strike two years ago revealed a shocking state of industrial anarchy, with the shop stewards, under the inspired but ruthless leadership of Sidney Maitland, ruling the roost. Mr. Maitland has now joined the full-time staff of the Electrical Trades Union, and lesser men have succeeded him (one of the subsidiary facts on which the community can congratulate itself is that the Communist Party nowadays is' throwing up more bunglers in minor union posts than it used to do; Mr. Maitland's Communist Party successors at the Airport have shown little of his courage or flair so far).
But there is a lesson to be learned on the other side, too. If the airport engineers and their unions, after working their claim through the proper machinery, had decided that their pay was so inadequate that they must strike, the pub- lic ought to have nursed no grievance against them either. But would it? There is a tendency nowadays to regard any strike in a public service as an unjustifiable nuisance. A nuisance it may be, but justice depends on how good a case either side has, not on the extent to which the public may be inconvenienced.
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