A Crisis of Confidence
By J. R. L. ANDERSON THE rash of unofficial strikes and other labour disputes by which we are afflicted is a symptom of deep-seated ills which may cause much more serious trouble soon if the are not taken in hand. Unhappily, there is very little sign that either the Government or the official trade union leadership on which the Government leans so heavily is doing anything at all to remove the root-causes of the trouble.
It is all very well for Mr. Isaacs to quote Pravda in a broad- cast and to warn the nation of a Communist conspiracy to stir up industrial unrest. There has been such a " conspiracy" for many years, and there is nothing particularly new about the information to which the Government has suddenly decided to attach so much importance. Had Mr. Isaacs or his advisers cared to read the published report of the executive committee of the British Communist Party presented to the Party's national congress in 1948 they would have seen set down in print : " Regular contact has been maintained with leading comrades in the industries and the professions through the work of the separate advisory committees and the monthly meetings held after each meeting of the executive committee."
This paragraph is in the report of what is described as the Communists' " Industrial Department " at the " Party Centre." A Mining Committee, a National Agricultural Committee, and a Rails Advisory Committee are referred to separately, and there are also precise references to Communist activities among road haulage workers, seamen, engineering workers, building workers and office workers. Other indus- tries listed as receiving attention from the " Industrial Department " include cotton, wool, clothing and the distri- butive trades. All this is published information, and it was in fact published over two years ago. In fairness it should be said that the Communists are not the only " outside body " to maintain an organisation inside the trade union movement. Both the Conservative and Liberal parties have trade union organisations, and so have the Catholics. However much some of these activities may be resented from time to time at Transport House, trade unionism is not really a private preserve of the Labour Party.
But the Communist problem is really_ a separate issue. Official attempts to make the nation's flesh creep with fear of Communist plotters may be necessary enough to put people on their guard, but they are utterly inadequate as an explan- ation of current industrial unrest. What is happening now is that we are reaping the consequences—the logical and predictable consequences—of the Government's lamentable failure even to try to resolve some of the contradictions inherent in a policy of planning for the community as a whole and free enterprise for all the vested interests of organised labour. We are bedevilled now by all sorts of sectional campaigns by various groups of workers : they are the inev- itable result of what has been all along a sectional policy.
The statistics of average earnings published last week by the Ministry of Labour chart the causes of a good deal of unrest. It became clear in 1947 that some sort of national wages policy was becoming urgently necessary, both to provide incentives and to prevent abuses in a community of full employment. The Government simply shied away from this problem and weakly left it to trade union leaders to do the best they could. But the General Council of the T.U.C. could not—and appar- ently cannot—devise a co-ordinate wages policy. It has no executive power over nearly 200 independent affiliated unions and its members are all officials of their own unions, with special—and quite proper—responsibilities to their own organisations. The most the General Council could do was to recommend a policy of negative wage-restraint ; even this was qualified by an escape clause admitting that wage- „ . there was no attempt to define the lower paid this was an irritant rather than a safety-valve. The Government, however, jumped at the chance of any expedient to reduce the danger of inflation, and used all its own influence to prevent wage increases from being given. But the laws of supply and demand stilL operate, although their effects may be clouded, and both employers and workpeople have found various ways of getting more money without wage-increases. Pieceworkers have, of course, been far more favourably placed than time-workers, and where piecework earnings have risen from increased output the rise has been entirely justified. But many workmen, including some of the most skilled, cannot be paid by the piece. Their work is often just as important—sometimes more important—than jobs paid by the piece, but their earnings are governed by wage-rates and they do not enjoy the pieceworkers' opportunities for increas- ing earnings. Various schemes of " merit money " and pro- duction bonuses have helped to mitigate this unfairness, but they have not removed it, and there has been constant pressure by time-workers for either higher wage-rate or for extra ways of earning overtime. Independent conceAions have been won with very little rhyme or reason about them. Busmen, for instance, after a strike by London men on New Year's day in 1949, have been given overtime rates for work on Saturday , afternoons, but railwaymen—who can make just as good a case as the busmen—have not. Inevitably there is resent- ment, and once a concession has been won by somebody there is a natural demand for the same concession somewhere else. The Ministry of Labour's latest statistics reveal the plain fact that while earnings have risen by 20 per cent since 1947, wage- rates have risen only by 10 per cent, against an increase even in the official price-index (which is a far from adequate measure of the cost of living) of 13 per cent. Those who can increase earnings are to some extent protected against a rising cost of living, but those dependent on wage-rates are not, and inevitably they look to their unions to do something about it. When the official leadership—it may be for good reasons—is slow to respond there is the possibility of an unofficial strike.
But strikes are not our only troubles. The dispute in the London printing industry manifests another aspect of the social pressures generated in a community of full employment without a policy for dealing with its problems. Before the war trade unions had to fight for national wage-agreements. Unemployment provided a buyers' market for labour, and many employers were reluctant to commit themselves to national agreements for higher rates when they could perhaps obtain men locally at lower rates. Now there is a sellers' market for many types of labour—for compositors in London an undoubtedly strong one—and it is the master printers who are insisting on a collective agreement and the union which is demanding separate bargains with individual employers. All this is the cumulative effect of the Government timidity and failure to face the most pressing problems of our wage-economy. There is a crisis of confidence. The Gov- ernment has forced so much of what should be its own respon- sibility upon trade union leaders that some of them have come to seem almost unofficial members of the Cabinet. It is scarcely to be wondered at that humble people with no access to Downing Street tend to include them in that vague and rather frightening " they " who control " us." Nor is it surprising that other trade union leaders are being forced by pressure from their members to wage sectional campaigns that might have made sense in 1900 but are damaging to the whole community—including the members of these unions them- selves—in 1950. There is no confidence in the Government's wages policy because it has no policy. What' is its policy about strikes ? It lets a very serious gas strike in London drag on for fourteen days without doing more than asking a trade union confederation to try to get the men back to work. It tells us that Communists are plotting against the nation,: • . •,, _ IC Complacency, timidity and makebelieve about the Welfare State are an open invitation to the Communists to cause trouble. The social pressures that have been generated by trying first to bottle up the nation's wage-economy, and then sitting on all safety-valves, will not be relieved by saying that it is all the Cominform's fault.
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