Munition Workers and Fire Watching
On Tuesday the annual conference of the Amalgamated Engineering Union passed an instruction to their executive to inform the Government that the Home Office's fire-watching regulations " would be unacceptable, unless payment for work done was assured in accordance with the overtime and night shift agreement of the union." That is indeed a " nothing like leather " affirmation of the principles of trade unionism. Every working fitter or turner, who takes his turn at night- watching for his factory, is to be paid for it, and paid at over- time and night-shift rates. One wonders whether the man who voted that resolution reflected that such a system, if conceded, must be conceded not to their members only but to everyone engaged in night-watching ; whether they had computed how many hundreds of millions sterling it would cost ; or whether they had related all this in any way to the problem of avoiding inflation and maintaining the level of their own real, as distinct from nominal, wages. Had it occurred to them that the soldier or sailor, who must in presence of the enemy be hazarding his life for days at a stretch, receives no overtime pay for it—and indeed almost no pay at all by comparison with what a large proportion of the members of the A.E.U. are now receiving?. This country is being saved for us all only by the principle of voluntary duty—by each one doing his utmost to defeat the enemy and rejecting " the love of nicely calculated less or more." A.R.P. requires a nucleus of whole-time workers, who as such should be paid. But it is not a practicable proposition to extend pay io the mass of part-time participants.
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