The Salary Squeeze
BY M. R. J. ANDERSON HE Credit Squeeze' has had a great conquest as a catch phrase; it peppers us daily from The Times and the tabloids, from the Third and Workers' Playtime. What a boon it has been to the managers of our banks as a dignified version of 'Please teacher, it wasn't me!' It covers a difficult interview all over like a cloak; calling on Mr. Butler's name (it is still to him all good bankers burn candles) brings the most recalcitrant customer quickly to heel.
But outside the manager's room another squeeze has been going on, not for the last year, but for the last sixteen. The bank clerk still hardly realises that his salary scale, once his guarantee of security, makes sense only when the terms in which it is expressed are stable. To have a fixed scale based on a cheapening pound is in effect the same thing as having a stable pound and a salary scale diminishing year by year. If his employers had announced such a scale in the days of the stable pound before 1939 it would have been greeted as a great scandal, or as a fantastic Gilbertian drollery. But the equivalent, a scale arbitrarily increased at a slower rate than that at which the pound is shrinking, has been half accepted by bank staffs as an Act of God, until they have been reduced to little more than subsistence level.
The Salary Squeeze which is crushing the bank clerk has also operated to some extent on all the salaried middle classes. They have all been gulled by the gigantic confidence trick of inflation. Their employers (strange allies to Mr. Bevan!) are eliminating them as a class; the small margin of money that enabled them to follow their customary way of life and enjoy .their modest cultural luxuries has gone. And the banks in par- ticular have not scrupled to play their part in this destruction by sheltering behind inflation to better themselves at the expense of their staffs.
Unfortunately for the present staffs, banks are under no pressure to make theirs an attractive calling for men. They have sharply curtailed their recruitment of youths, possibly with a wary eye on the sciencerfiction potentialities of auto- mation, which might considerably reduce the need for large permanent staffs. In the place of the young men, girls, who are well able to cope with the routine jobs of mechanised book-keeping. are being engaged in increasing numbers. With. their `ten-year careers' come the automatic resignations that cut the pensions bill, but at the same time place an increas- ing burden of responsibility on the. older staffs. Not that the banks have any need to tempt these older men to remain. Over-recruiting thirty years ago has produced staffs heavily weighted with men in their forties, who have long passed the point of no return; they are in the banks for good. It is upon these men that the Salary Squeeze has acted most harshly. Before 1939 'top of scale' was over six times the salary on entry. It is now little over three times greater.
The banks are under no outside pressure to ameliorate conditions. In banking there is no effective trade union to bargain for the staffs. They have had an independent union since 1918, the National Union of Bank Employees, but it has never had a membership sufficient to enable it to speak for the majority of the bank staffs. Each bank purports to negotiate salaries separately with its own 'house union,' but the results of the negotiations, as in the case of the recent increases, arc always almost identical and are announced at about the same time. The banks arc proud of the free competition that exists between them; this then must surely be another case for invesn' gation by the Society for Psychical Research! It is probable that these domestic 'Staff Associations' of banks, surviving in hardly any other industry, are the chin means by which the membership Of NUKE has been kept doves, They are approved, while NUBE is ignored. The excellent so,' relations that exist between the management and individnd encourage the conviction that the despotism of the banks is essentially benevolent. There is also a widespread fedi''@ among bank staffs that membership of, particularly takill, office in, the Staff Associations is the way to promotion, Oil' membership of NUBE brands one as a thinker of danger°11", thoughts. But undoubtedly the middle-class background of the staffs and their traditions of service have in the past conditioned these new Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to a view that membership of an independent union frowned on by their employers is disloyal. But there are signs that the complex reasons that have restrained bank employees from joining their, union may b,iej weakening. They have in the past few months watched fascination, and some Mittyish imaginings, the 'get tong" campaign of the teachers, and have seen firmness rapieib, produce apparently greatly improved conditions. The Nation''' Union of Bank Employees had 25,000 members in 1946; there were 35,000 by the end of 1954. A winter campaign early jD 1955 commented on by many periodicals read by profession II men hoisted this figure to its present level of over 47,x' But the bank staffs are still part of the middle classes, where the notion dies hard that 'not belonging to a union' is a 110, of respectability. To them, the essential conservatives, ,r word itself has raffish revolutionary overtones. and can hardly' . even be spoken except shamefacedly. The successes of trade unions are daily thrust at them from the headlines, but their principles forbid thetn to join. This dichotomy of head lw,, heart would Seem to be the contemporary dilemma for 111c salaried middle classes. It is the dilemma of seeing their families come down in the world, yet knowing that the only way of halting the decline is by actions contrary to their rill; ciples. For they realise with their heads that in the end uni°r1 can be their only weapon of defence; that the weapon has been tried by others; that no one else will fight their battles' Is the paradox of the times for the middle classes that they can only save themselves from foundering by pitching over' board some of the ballast of their middle-class principles?
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