TRH LOCK-OUT AND ITS ISSUES. T HERE was not really very
much hope of preventing the lock-out in the engineering trades last week ; such eleventh-hour attempts at keeping the peace as were made failed, and the lock-out notices duly took effect last Saturday. Still, we are not without hope that an arrange- ment will be come to before long, either as the result of the inquiry which we are extremely glad to see the men have asked for, or as the result of a further review of the situation by both sides. There is talk of another ballot by the men, and this in itself is a way out not to be quite ignored, because the majority at the original ballot, which turned down the advice of the Ex.ecutive, was a small one and the ballot was remarkable for the number of abstentions Hardly more than one man out of five troubled to vote, and though it would be unfair to say that those who abstained approved of the employers' terms, it is at least a reasonable inference that as they did not vote they cannot have felt very strongly on the subject.
The chief thing for the public to demand is the letting in of more light. The public is a very powerful third party to every industrial dispute, and in the case of pro- tracted struggles public opinion is in the end decisive. But what does the public know about the present dispute ? Very little indeed. The ostensible reason for the lock-out was a dispute about overtime, and the men earned some sympathy in pointing out that they were unwilling to work overtime while many of their mates were unemployed. On the other hand, employers do not demand overtime for fun. It is clearly a very expensive method of carrying on work. The public, however, is gradually discovering that behind the immediate pretext there is a great volume of unsettled issues between the employers and the employed. Overtime is only an incident in the complicated and far- reaching question of the exercise of managerial functions. The public, we think, has a right to complain, as we com- plained last week, that the employers have not made their case clear. That they have a pretty strong case we have no doubt whatever, but to allow it to be misjudged is not only. a very unwise policy, but, in a sense, an offence against that powerful third party, the public. We trust that the employers, breaking, away from the bad example of the coalowners during the last great strike, will as quickly as possible issue a full explanation, which everybody can understand, of what they stand for.
If the dispute had been only about overtime and the assertion by the employers of a right to decide without reference to the men when overtime is "necessary," the men would not have found it very difficult to reply. For in 1919 Sir Allan Smith was Chairman of the Employers' delegation at the Joint Committee of the National Industrial Conference of Employers and Workers, and that Joint Committee recommended that the extent of overtime in any trade, and the conditions under which it may be worked, should be determined "by the representatives of the trade." That seems to mean that before overtime is called for the representatives of the men should be consulted. Yet, apparently, engineering employers have refused to consult the unions in advance as regards over- time. Now, we can well believe that overtime has very often to be decided upon in a hurry in order to finish jobs which (owing to an under-estimate of the time required, or to slow working, or to mishaps with the machinery) require a few extra hours of labour when it is too late to arrange for another shift. It is easy to picture the despair of employers and foremen if work has to be rushed through in order to finish a contract at the appointed time and the representatives of the men when consulted about overtime import extraneous questions into the discussion and raise all sorts of pernickety objections. We know that on such occasions the conduct of the men's repre- sentatives can be maddening, and it is not to be wondered at that the employers want to reach a boundary settle- ment once and for all about managerial functions. The employers have, in fact, definitely stated that this is their object.
All we can say is that it was a mistake ever to allow the public, through want of better information, to believe that overtime was a very material point in the controversy. Granted, however, that it is natural for the employers to wish to settle finally the question of who is captain of the ship, there are wise and unwise ways of approaehing the • subject. For one thing, it seems to us a bad policy to inscribe on a banner in any industrial struggle vague phrases like "managerial functions" and "the proper functions of trade unions." What do these phrases mean? Unless they are illustrated by definite cases they not only mean very little to the public but may, from their very vagueness, cause the men to go on resisting long after they might have agreed to terms had the facts been clearer. Take an analogy from quite another sphere. In 1914, in those unforgettable days when it was still not settled that we should have to go to war with Germany, the nation wandered in a mist of doubt because it could not apply to its own satisfaction the principles at stake. But directly Belgium was invaded everything seemed clear. The case had been stated. The material example had been given. That is the kind of clarifying illustration which we want now.
We cannot agree to the idea that the workers have no right to a share in determining the conditions under which they work. We are told that if their present demands are granted it will be impossible for the engineering trades to carry on. It may be so, but owing to the want of clear information and specific instances we are still unable to judge. It will be remembered that in the past nearly every new demand by a trade union was met by the argument that it would be fatal to the industry concerned.
We are not very much impressed, therefore, by the mere abstract cry of Wolf." We want to see the wolf. We want to examine his teeth. It seems to us to be quite within the range of what is practicable to grant the men a considerable influence in certain matters which come broadly under the head of " management " • but we agree that it would be intolerable to allow trade unions, as such, to have a directing voice in matters of extreme delicacy where success or failure turns upon highly-trained- knowledge of manufacturing processes or upon the quota- tion of prices and the selection of markets. A particular danger at the moment is that the extremists, those whom the ordinary British working man calls "the Bolshies," recognize that they are now given another chance, and not at all a. bad one, of swinging Labour over to the extreme left. The violent and unscrupulous set of instructions issued in the name of Communism, and intercepted and published by Scotland Yard, are a very good example of what the Bolshies hope to do in the way of turning an ordinary industrial struggle into chaos and ultimate revolution. In these circumstances the employers ought to be extraordinarily careful- to give neither the public nor the locked-out men themselves the slightest excuse for saying that there is any victimization or that advantage is being taken of the men's financial weakness to wipe out years of progress and thrust the men back into a condition from which they thought they had finally emerged. We know perfectly rell that such objects are utterly repugnant to the mind of every decent employer in this country. But superfluous misunderstandings are none the less disastrous, and they may be made even more disastrous by some stupid phrasemonger, some bad employer, or some idiotic trade union .executive. It is an invaluable rule to bear in mind that when you are strong you can afford to be polite. But, as we have said, the chief thing needed at the moment is more light. There are issues behind the engineering dispute which the public have not yet suspected. Both employers and men know this, and they are inspired to a determination which the public has found it difficult to account for. So let the third party be taken into the confidence of beth.
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