UNIONS AND STRIKERS
THE different issues underlying the Transport Strike—which remains unsettled as this is written, though an early settlement seems probable—must be clearly distinguished. There are the particular claims put forward by the strikers in opposition to the award given by the Road Haulage Central Wages Board ; there is the relation of the strikers to their own union, the Transport and General Workers' ; there is the attitude of the strikers towards the whole community ; and there is the attitude of the Trade Union movement towards the Government. Of these the actual demands are the least important. In themselves they are not unreasonable. They concern principally payment for overtime, and the length of holidays with pay. On these points—notably the claim for a 44-hour week instead of 48, which would have meant increased pay for overtime—the Wages Board, on which the men's union is fully represented, found against the claimants, the decision being for nine days' holiday a year, which means only three days over the six statutory holidays. Herr there is much to be said for the men's claim. As figures published in a recent issue of the Ministry of Labour Gazette show, most of the agreements regarding holidays provide for twelve days altogether, i.e. six days in addition to the statutory holidays ; that indeed is roughly the average, for the trades where only the six days are given are set off by about as many more where the rule is 18. Twelve days in the year is little enough holiday for anyone, and none of the demands put forward could be described as in any sense revolution- ary. What is revolutionary, and subversive of all orderly and rational conduct of industry, is the method chosen to challenge the whole constitutional machinery of negotiation.
What the strikers have chosen to do, to put it tersely, is to hold the community to ransom by throwing the whole mechanism of its food-supply into chaos, rather than make representations in the proper quarter in the proper way and wait for three to four weeks for them to take effect. The finding to which exception is taken was promulgated on December 31st, in the form of a recommendation to be confirmed (and thereby made binding) by the Minister. But before it goes to the Minister at all twenty-one days must intervene during which the strikers collectively, or any one of them individually, or their union (whose advice they are comprehensively defying), may lodge objections to the finding, after which the Board must reconsider it before sending it on, in the original or a revised form, to the Minister. That is a procedure neither lengthy nor complicated ; but the men would have none of it. Disregarding completely the sound advice of their leaders, chief among them Mr. Arthur Deakin, who has, succeeded Mr. Bevin as General Secretary of the Transport Workers' and General Union, they have adopted what, where the food of the people is so directly concerned, is virtually a policy of blackmail, and declared an unofficial strike- which has spread numerically and geographically till the Government—a Labour Government depending on and consisting largely of trade unionists has been compelled to call in troops to move food and save the population of London from starvation. This is not trade unionism, it is anarchy ; and if it were allowed to succeed it would be on a small scale revolution.
It has therefore been imperative from the first that such methods should not be allowed to succeed. The Government has had to recognise that as much as anyone, and from some points of view it is as well that it is a Labour Government, not an admini- stration that could be denounced, as capitalist, that has to face this situation. It has gone quite as far as is wise in conciliating the strikers. By next Tuesday the period for the lodging of objections will have expired, and the Wages Board would then have been able to meet at once and make its recommendation, whether modified or not in the light of representations, final. But rather than expect the strikers to wait till then it has been decided to improvise quick-moving mechanism in the form of an Industrial Council, on which both masters and men would be represented, which would aim at reaching a rapid and agreed solution. The case for that, and on the whole it is a sound case, is that in a situation in which troops are called in to do the work of strikers there are always elements of danger, and it is essential to get the strike ended and normal work resumed at the earliest moment possible. That has throughout been the endeavour of the official union, of whose attitude no complaint at all can be made, which has pronounced the strikers' demands just and undertaken to support them by every constitutional method. The natural con- stitutional method would be the lodging of the objections with the Wages Board, but that was superseded as soon as the expedient of an Industrial Council, whose constitution was settled on Tuesday, had been decided on. Though this had the unqualified support of the Transport Union it would appear that the strikers' committee expected, before accepting it, some assurance of what its findings would be. That, of course, was an impossible demand which, if persisted in, would be fatal to all negotiation. Accept- ance of the Joint Council machinery must clearly be uncon- ditional.
This latest and gravest of many recent unofficial strikes has unquestionably brought discredit on the whole trade union move- ment—as a trade union M.P., Mr. T. O'Brien, said very frankly and forcibly at Nottingham on Tuesday. It represents, as has been said, anarchy instead of order, it means pressing the par- ticular claims, whether just or unjust, of a small section of the community with total disregard for the comfort and welfare of the whole community, it displays the workers as out primarily—or rather those particular workers—for what they can get for them- selves in complete indifference to the desperate needs of the country. Grave questions are raised by such demonstra- tions of the failure of the unions to retain the loyalty of their followers, or of a Labour Government to exert an effective influence on Labour. Every argument in favour of the closed shop breaks down if unions which claim the right to compel every worker to join them prove incapable of persuading their members to keep the rules or to work through the officials whom they have chosen for the specific purpose of representing and voicing their interests. Even when union discipline is observed the perpetually recurrent demands for rises of pay in this or that industry, accompanied by threats of strikes or "working slow," arouse, or should arouse, general concern. Where, in such matters, is finality to be found? Every rise in wages has its reflection in increased cost of the rele- vant service or finished product, and thus imposes new hardships on consumers. The Government so far is not in a position to announce anything in the nature of a wages policy. It must not be judged too hardly for that. You cannot standardise wages in different industries as you can standardise various conditions of work, such as the length of the working week or the number of days' holiday in the year. But as long as the idea prevails that demands for increase of wages are to be periodic and indefinite, particularly in industries—like printing or catering or food-supply —in which a stoppage would cause the maximum of inconvenience, so long will the outlook for British industry be darkened by a perpetual and disastrous uncertainty. The statement that T.U.C. and British Employers Confederation representatives reached agreement on Wednesday on the first steps towards a wages policy is in the circumstances particularly welcome.
There are other issues, less contentious but not less funda- mental, whose discussion recent events make inevitable. Is the process of amalgamation and absorption so vehemently decried by trade unionists in the sphere of `.` big business" salutary beyond contention where the unions themselves are concerned? Is, for example, so vast an organfsation as the •Transport and General Workers' Union more capable of keeping contact with, and exacting loyalty from, its individual members than the smaller unions which it has systematically and sometimes ruthlessly absorbed? What, in another sphere, is to be the relation between the unions and the Government, as employer, in the new nationalised industries? Is the light-headed abrogation of the measure forbidding local authorities to adopt a "closed shop" policy (recent examples of what happens when they do have been instructive) to be taken as foreshadowing a like policy in the coal and tran§port and other industries? Misgivings about the growing power of the unions should not perhaps be emphasised unduly at a moment when the union concerned in the recent trouble has been behaving correctly, and it is rebels within its ranks that have been behaving incorrectly, but it is proper at least to call attention with some urgency to the dangers, as well as the undoubted virtues, inherent in the trade union movement.
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