THE GUERILLAS' REVENGE
THE newspaper strike is the latest card and most sinister of the Electrical Trade Union's guerilla operations against British industry (the engineers' union is involved too, but in the back seat). The only mystery is why the ETU leaders did not strike at the press before. They had good reason to do so. The press had attacked them frequently, and often venomously, for their communism and for their unscrupulous tactics in industrial disputes; it had exposed and helped to wreck some of their schemes, such as the Lyons strike last year If the ETU wanted revenge, too, as presumably it did, the press was a sitting target. A handful of electricians, by striking, could disrupt the whole industry with no trouble and negligible expense. Apart from the benefits to be won in wages, the strike would also have a good chance of smashing the newspaper pro- prietors' ring'—the Newspaper Proprietors' Association—by setting the individual proprietors at each others' throats : `divide and rule.' THE newspaper strike is the latest card and most sinister of the Electrical Trade Union's guerilla operations against British industry (the engineers' union is involved too, but in the back seat). The only mystery is why the ETU leaders did not strike at the press before. They had good reason to do so. The press had attacked them frequently, and often venomously, for their communism and for their unscrupulous tactics in industrial disputes; it had exposed and helped to wreck some of their schemes, such as the Lyons strike last year If the ETU wanted revenge, too, as presumably it did, the press was a sitting target. A handful of electricians, by striking, could disrupt the whole industry with no trouble and negligible expense. Apart from the benefits to be won in wages, the strike would also have a good chance of smashing the newspaper pro- prietors' ring'—the Newspaper Proprietors' Association—by setting the individual proprietors at each others' throats : `divide and rule.'
Most important of all, the strike would exactly fulfil the dictates of the party line. The Communist Party is politically so feeble in Britain that the Communists' only prospect is to take over and refurbish the old trade union strategy. They have to persuade the worker that his best interests are served by getting the employer by the throat on every possible occasion. Such methods are naturally unpalatable to the TUC, and to most of the other unions, because since 1939 trade unionism in Britain has been moving in the opposite direction : towards co-opera- tion with the employers. The ETU has rejected this policy; instead, it has carried out a campaign of systematic guerilla warfare, designed in the short run to produce higher wages for its members, and in the long run to so embarrass and disrupt industry as a whole that Communism will at last become an attractive proposition politially.
The ETU's method as rule is to single out prosperous and efficient businesses and pin the squeeze on them, on the basis that they can afford to pay more. Sometimes they can, and do. Immediately the ETU tirns round and says to all the other businesses'in the industry, 'If some can afford to pay more, all must afford to pay more.' Other workers inevitably become restive when they see an electrician getting more while their own unions are urging wage Testraint : and so the disruptive process is set in train.
* * * The present strike is a good example of the technique. As Mr. Randolph Churchill writes on another page, the elec- tricians and engineeris in the newspaper business are the best paid in the country. The only real case the ETU has for de- manding more is that the newspapers are doing so well they can afford to pay more, which, of course, is true : the press has been enjoying a sustained. agreeable boom. But with freed newsprint and commercial television just round the corner, will the pros- perity last? And even if it could be proved that its prosperity is lasting, would that be a good argument for this wage increase? Nowadays, wages over the bulk of industry are not geared to capacity to pay. It is easy, therefore, to see what the ETU's next step is going to be, if it gets the increases. It will demand that pay for electricians in all other industries must rise, to keep in step with their brothers in the press. The engineers' union will take the same line. The other press workers, compositors, journalists, and so on, will want more, too; and people doing equivalent work in other industries will grow discontented— and so on. The Communists will sit back, rubbing their hands.
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