Labour
Dock dilemma
David W. Wragg
It is almost two years since the last nue dock strike hit the British economy, leaving I others to take their turn at the now title" ; honoured game of striking, dravi11 supplementary social security benefits 11 , their families, and firing the raging furnace0 inflation. The interim for dock workers been in effect one long Christmas, with the I promise of even better tomorrow, for if anY one section of the community has been able te have its cake and eat it, that section has been those employed in the country's major Poetsi I When the last Conservative governine5 ( came to office, one of the benefits expect t from it was the abolition of the National Doos, Labour Scheme, originally designed to giver degree of security, with fall-back pay 1° t periods without employment, to the docker: but widely held to be an anachronism viitr; t the end of the original casual system e„II employment and the attachment of men regular employers during the late 'sixties. 011 4 the other hand, the dockers and their 100 a wished to see the Scheme extended — At° e those small and enterprising ports left outsiuei it by the accident of history, and to traditiode„ forms of 'dock work' moved away from the, immediate port areas by the need for greater a, space created by modern techniques. In an attempt to buy off the dockers during it the 1972 strike, the then Conservative et
he •
government initiated an inquiry into t..II Scheme and, more particularly, the n°111 Scheme ports, under the joint chairmanshiP e NI the Port of London Authority's Lord Aldad tl ton and Jack Jones of the Transport an General Workers Union. This has now Om at home to roost, with proposals for extendingf lit the Scheme to the smaller ports — some ° which, such as Felixstowe, are quite laege; re Labour now has decisions to take which we', " th shelved by their predecessors. What are the differences between the tv!o all types of ports? Basically, the dockers in tried to non-Scheme ports are employed on terms andc conditions similar to those prevailine throughout industry as a whole, while those, in the Scheme ports cannot be hired, fired °; transferred without the consent of the Lace' Dock Labour Board, on which representative: of employees and employers sit. In the those without work could not be dismisse"A but instead were transferred to an unattachem register, on which they were paid for literallY not working, the cost being met by a criPPling levy on the port employers. d4
The employers in the Scheme ports wisi
for either the end of the Scheme, or help w_l`re the levy by its extension to the non-Schell:1 Ya ports, an unfair suggestion since emplqe% there already had their normal contribution' 11; to the Redundancy Payments Scheme to p9,Ye' ft) and from which the Scheme ports well, ra exempt. Aldington-Jones nevertheless, as i :d nterim measure, insisted that the unattach ,te■ register in each Scheme port be divic.4
an
I amongst the employers there — forcing, ins' tead of their levy payments, a share-out of
surplus labour which had to be given the same full rate of pay as men working.
t At the same time, a new and generous sysem of Voluntary Severance Payments was introduced to speed up the early retirement of rneri from the industry, but unlike earlier MPloyer-sponsored schemes this one was at "le cost of the taxpayer. The results were Predictable. There was a stampede to leave
t the industry, transforming a labour surplus
g Into a shortage made more acute by the tact that those who left were the more skilled and able-bodied men. The Government must now be asking itself )e st where it can go from here. Unlike an is earlier proposal for extending the Dock Labour Scheme in London, it cannot rely 1113on antagonism between differing factions ,0 within the unions to persuade the interested Parties quietly to drop the proposals. Nor can ;, It offer nationalisation of the ports as a l'anacea without an overall majority in the 4 .t)rnmons, even if nationalisation were prac tt:cal from the administrative viewpoint 0, ecause the last Labour government's port le nationalisation plans had to be watered down f. L° include only the larger ports.
The unions might say that the extension of he National Dock Labour Scheme is a more
o IftP, Mediate question than nationalisation, but IS would also require legislation first, which 00 a hard fact so often overlooked. The unions e0, atie not in a completely unassailable position her, since an earlier survey by the National 01 forts Council, a government-backed body, 1e Und that men in the non-Scheme ports en0 Y,ed conditions usually comparable with, „.".0 sometimes better than, their counterparts tbwithin the Scheme. Of course, the fact that Ze non-Scheme ports give better service and a profit at the same time is likely to cut ",!;!e ice with the present administration. rif h/ 'here is really no alternative but to end the g. thational Dock Labour Scheme, exposing it as Id He sham and the restrictive practice it is. afr.‘'ever, if a Conservative government can 1$ ord to be inactive in such a matter, there is f tle chance of a Labour government grasping e. feach an unpleasant nettle. Anarchy and re th tber-bedding in' the docks is just a part of ;we Price levied on the country for supporting o alleak and indecisive politicians, and for iOer,°wing the differences between the parties po" 11. arrow to the detriment of the standard of cal debate and, ultimately, government. ;e
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