THE POLITICS OF ENVY
Sut,—I disagree with the main contention of Charles Curran's article 'The Politics of Envy' that lower- grade workers are wanting to move back to a non- differentiation in rates of pay.
As a manual worker and as a clerk over the last few years I have had a chance of observing a growing resentment against non-differentiation. Especially in nationalised industries where accidents of circumstance may make one man's job much more arduous than another's who may be doing the same type of job for the same rate of pay— She hard-pressed one simply doing more of it than the other man. For instance, some railway stations are much busier and yet more poorly equipped than others—particularly rural ones—arc. Also in places where skilled and non-skilled work happens to be integrated in a common piece of work done side by side by skilled and unskilled workers—where in point of fact the latter's pay packet can be much the bulkier.
The worker may, when politically roused (very seldom now), shout non-differentiation, but what he mutters in' private is distinctly otherwise. He likes to get more more than he likes to get as much; it is only the shibboleths of egalitarianism that super- ficially bemuse him. It is a strange thing to notice that though a group of workers may be paid at a fixed and equal rate of pay and therefore know each what his fellow gets they still count their wage money privately after being paid as though their pay is still a different and a 'to-be-guarded secret. Even in the Forces 1 used to notice that though leaving our open pay-table with monotonously bawled-but uniform sums of money few men openly checked their money, and at .a rate checkable by watchers.
I would say that if it were, if it becomes, possible to eliminate altogether the soap-box slogans still lingering from soap-box days of long ago, to mouth- wash some Left-wing politicians (they cannot be brain-washed), Socialism as politics would rapidly assume the proportions of today's Liberal adherence. —Yours faithfully,
T. W. OADD 86 Trimpley Lane, Bewdley, Worcs
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