SEAMEN'S STRIKE Can Britain's Shipping Survive?
By WILFRED BECKERMAN
WHILE there has been growing recognition that perhaps the seamen have a case after all, it is generally supposed that not much atten- tion need be paid to it since the owners cannot afford to pay any more and the taxpayer cannot be asked to pay as it is neither a nationalised industry nor a 'way of life' like agriculture.
Consequently, public discussion of the eco- nomics of the dispute tends to be side-tracked from the question of what ought to be done in an industry which, apparently, cannot pay its way without the employees in it receiving lower wages than they could get elsewhere or than other countries' shipping lines are, apparently, able to pay their men. Of course, precise compari- sons of actual earnings by the seamen in different countries are impossible to come by; reliable figures cannot even be obtained for British sea- men, so primitive are the accounting systems of many of the shipping lines. But total earnings that reflect large and uneven amounts of over- time are irrelevant anyway. There can be no disputing the fact that, hour for hour, British seamen are paid very much less than those of, say, the Swedish or Norwegian lines, not to mention the American lines.
And, furthermore, some 30,000-50,000 Asiatic seamen—between one-third and one-half of the industry's total labour force—are employed in British ships, who, not being members of the NUS, are paid at much lower rates. Before everybody gets indignant with the seamen, it is well to ask which other groups of British work- men would tolerate a body of cut-rate non- unionist foreign workers being employed alongside themselves?
If, under such conditions, the shipping lines cannot make ends meet, what, then, is the trouble with the shipping industry? Why is it so un- competitive? If it is due to exceptional in- efficiency, then the place to put pressure is on the shipowners. But if there are factors beyond their control, then the public has to face the possibility of other solutions, such as a smaller shipping industry or subsidisation or protection. With any other industry that is unable to pay its way because it is uncompetitive, such as farming or textiles, nobody suggests that it is the employees that have to carry the burden. We don't ask the railwaymen or the farm workers to work for abnormally low wages because rail- ways cannot compete with roads or because agriculture cannot compete with imports.
The fact is that shipping is an international industry which, by the very nature of the pro- cess, has tended to be relatively less and less profitable for high-wage countries. With other industries, the usual reaction has been toilet the industry decline, or to protect it in some way or another, or to subsidise it if there is no means of rationalising it in order to concentrate, as has been the case with textiles, on some lines in which we have a comparative advantage.
In shipping, some scope certainly exists for improvements in productivity. But the record over the last fifteen years has not been too bad in this respect. Allowing for the increasing size of ships and faster turn-round and so on, and even before making allowance for the rise in the average value of the freight carried, pro- ductivity per seaman employed has risen about 75 per cent—a far better record than most in-
dustries can claim. At the same time, the weekly wage rate has risen at half the speed of that of the economy as a whole.
Nor have the seamen resisted measures to im- prove productivity, although this has accelerated the rate at which their employment has declined —another respect in which they have been at least as, if not more, enlightened as many other trade unions. For example, they agreed to a scheme by the Shell company to rationalise the use of seamen by means of the introduction of `general purpose crews' in return for a fair share of the savings, but this scheme was turned down by the Shipping Federation, on which are represented several small lines whose efficiency falls below that of Shell and other large com- panies. It is all very well complaining about extremists and Luddites on the trade union side, but it should not be forgotten that there are some on the employers' side who can be just as obstructive.
Nor have the seamen failed to oppose measures, such as flag discrimination, which would protect their industry. They have not even objected to the fact that about 18 per cent of coastal shipping, let alone foreign traffic, is partly in the hands of foreign lines. What would any other union do if, say, cheap Asiatic labour were used to run a bus service from Hammersmith to Marble Arch?
Thus it is impossible either to blame the sea- men for restrictive practices or to blame the owners for failing to clock up a reasonable record 'of productivity growth. The competitive
strains in this industry have simply become so acute during the last few years that very few of the higher-wage countries have been able to bear them. And the situation is likely to get worse. Already, at the United Illations Trade and Development Conference, the developing coun- tries expressed their desire to resort to flag dis- crimination as a means of building up this par- ticular 'infant' industry and some Latin American countries have recently resorted to this method of protection.
The issue that has to be faced, therefore, is what the country as a whole expects the industry to do. A co-ordinated transport policy would go a little of the way, by encouraging the greater use of cheap coastal traffic as an alterna- tive to some of the present high cost (including social costs) of road and rail transport. But, apart from this, the alternatives to be faced are government-sponsored rationalisation (as with textiles), protection, subsidies, complete substi- tution of cheap foreign labour for British sea- men for all the less skilled jobs on a ship, or simply letting the industry run down faster. Apart from the economic arguments against sub- sidies or protection in industries where there are no indirect economic or social benefits to be obtained, it is extremely doubtful if such solu- tions would be effective. In spite of the prolifera- tion of subsidies (on the shipbuilding costs) and protective devices employed by the American shipping industry, their share of the world tonnage (excluding tankers) has fallen from about 32 per cent in 1955 to 16 per cent in 1965.
But whatever the appropriate combination of solutions to be adopted, these are the issues that have to be discussed and attention must not be diverted from the plight of the industry by con- centrating on why the seamen must bear responsibility for propping up a shaky incomes policy.
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