Force Majeure
By JOHN COLE
THE dockers' settlement has revealed what a dim 'guiding light' the Government ignited with its White Paper on Incomes. This is almost as important a result of the settlement as the avoidance of a national dock strike, for it should kill beyond hope of resurrection the dangerous fiction that a wages policy can be drawn along the prim mathematical lines which Mr. Selwyn Lloyd sought to use. In the same week, the palpably unfair effect on the nurses of the Government's reverence for its own deification of 21 per cent. has emphasised how inequitably such a system must work.
What the Treasury has failed to grasp—and this speaks volumes about its frightening lack of human understanding—is that industrial re- lations are not only a question of economics, but of people's lives. The dockers had their last wage increase in August, 1960. Other groups had increases in 1961, some as long ago as 1959, and so on. The Government, or the nation, has failed to hold the cost of living steady in the intervening periods, and therefore no attempt now to impose a single level of increases on all groups could hope to succeed in a free society. In the event, the Government has imposed its will on the weaker elements in its own employ- ment, notably the civil servants, and probably, in the end, the nurses; compromised with the potentially strong but non-militant groups, like the railwaymen; and surrendered or condoned surrender where it faced real industrial strength, as in the power stations and the docks.
The Ministry of Labour, the traditional re- pository of government wisdom on labour rela- tions, has been in a very real dilemma since 1957, when Mr. Peter Thorneycroft, as Chan- cellor, first revealed to an astonished nation that there is a connection between wages and in- flation. On the one hand, the Minister of Labour is a member of the Government, and as such must seek to support its wages policy. On the other hand, his Ministry's conciliation services have really no more precise terms of reference than to seek to avoid industrial strife. On most occasions the only way to do that is a com- promise settlement, which often owes more to horse-trading than to either equity or national economic policy.
All this makes the establishment of any more logical or healthy national wages policy very, difficult. Although the. Labour Party, in oppo- sition, always gives the sophisticated impression that it could handle this subject much better, it had little success, a few years ago, when composing its policy document Plan for Pro- gress, in getting undertakings from the unions. In the end, the TUC agreed to the inclusion of a most innocuous paragraph indicating that with a just economic policy from a Labour Government, the unions would co-operate. This was asking for rather a lot to be taken on trust.
Since that time, a certain muted realism has developed at Congress House. In a confidential background document, the revolutionary idea of agreeing to deferred benefits for workers in times of national economic difficulty was pro- pounded—and as well as traditional fringe bene- fits like sick pay and pensions, this included the payment of wage increases in interest-bearing bonds. The idea is being allowed to seep slowly into the general trade union consciousness.
The other way in which the problem is being tackled is through the National Economic De- velopment Council. It is sometimes forgotten that the White Paper introduced an intermediate phase between the wages pause, which lasted from July until April, and the millennium, which Neddy is confidently expected to produce some time in the future. That is the theory. More realistically, the new Council's guardian angels have wisely decided to steer it right away from this most difficult of all the 'obstacles to growth' until a little mutual confidence has been estab- lished between its employer and trade union members. The NEDC may produce something valuable on wages in the end, but it will cer- tainly take a long time.
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