Spectator's Notebook
'THE general impression we are being given of I the seamen's strike and the issues involved goes. I suppose, something like this: The seamen are being a little naughty in asking for a 17 per cent pay rise only a year after they got a IS per cent increase; but, after all, they're not very highly paid and they lead a terrible life, deprived of the company of their wives and mothers-in- law for long periods at a time; but whatever the rights and wrongs of the case the Government has to stand firm to defend the incomes pOlicy, because if this goes so will the British economy.
What's wrong with this account? Everything. In the first place, it's not the Government that's standing firm at all—indeed, the Government's role in all this business is minimal. It is a dispute between the seamen and their employers, and it is the shipowners who are standing firm. I've no doubt that they've got the fullest moral support and encouragement of Messrs Wilson, Brown and Gunter: but the fact is that it's the ship- owners alone who bear the brunt of the cost of the strike. And the reason they're standing firm is nothing to do with the so-called incomes policy: it's simply because they calculate, first, that they can't afford to yield and, second; that they won't be faced with a serious shortage of seamen (deserting to seek higher wages plus the SET premium in shore-based manufacturing) if they don't.
And that's all there is to it. Arguments about the rights and wrongs are irrelevant. Collective bargaining may be different from individual bar- gaining, but it is still bargaining, and not a means of settling moral or metaphysical issues. The only 'rights' involved are the right to strike and the right to resist a strike. And if the pound is so precarious that it can't survive the first sea- men's strike for fifty-five years then it doesn't deserve to.
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