Engineers Amok
It is a little late in the day to suggest that the engineering unions' decision to ask for a pay increase which would add £125,000,000 to the annual wage bill has broken the dam against inflation. The dam was already in a parlous state before the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions met at Swansea' on Tuesday. But if the doctrine announced by their' president, Mr. H. G. Brotherton, that if profits go up, wages must go up too, is accApted, then the hope of any escape from the inflationary flood is dead. The argument that reward should be governed not by effort, enterprise and risk, nor even by need, but by some fixed relationship between different types of income belongs, to the economics of the madhouse. Even engineers might come to see some of its dangers if they could bring themselves to face two issues which are really only corollaries of Mr. Brotherton's proposition : " Are you willing that wages should fall when profits fall ? " and " Are you willing that profits shall rise when wages rise ? " But no doubt in the peculiar world in which the leaders of engineering unions live—a world in which Communists are more frequently found than they are in the world at large—some answer could be found to these questions which, even if it did not satisfy the intellect, might raise a cheer in Swansea. And never at any time should pronouncements of the engineering unions on the subject of profits be ignored. They Were the pioneers of the campaign which recently resulted in the Government's decision to limit profits and let wages run free— a campaign which underlines the ominous truth that what the fellow-travelling fringe thinks today is the Labour Party policy of tomorrow.
