WAGES AND ARMY PAY
By VISCOUNT HINCHINGBROOKE, M.P.
Is this principle right and wise? Does it contribute to a high national morale, to that spirit of unity which must animate a nation engaged in total war? In the first place, it is important to examine the differences that divide serving men from industrial workers, and see how far they have been exaggerated. What are these differences? The serving man considers that the skilled and un- skilled worker earns too much money ; at any rate, he has ample proof that it is more than he earns himself. No Government White Paper showing him the cash value of what he is receiving in kind will cutwcigh the evidence of his eyes or the evidence of his wife's letters as to the standard of living enjoyed by the people next door. No 6d. per day deferred pay—a mere £9 per year— will compensate him for the knowledge that week after week his neighbour is purchasing a war-savings certificate or depositing LI at the bank. He asks whether his services in the front line are rated less highly by the country than those of his brothers on the assembly-line, and he questions whether a total war-effort does not demand the same call on the industrial worker's services—at any hour in the 24 and 365 days in the year—and at the same price in money, with the same penalty for non-fulfilment as he himself experiences.
These feelings do not apply in all cases. Far from it. Nor when they exist are they so bitter as to constitute a danger. But, broadly speaking, such thoughts as these ar: in the back of many serving men's minds, and are shared by many officers of high rank. At the same time, the soldier—to write of the Service I know best—is bound to admit on reflection that the civilian is in very different circumstances from himself, and in not altogether more favourable circumstances. The soldier's training, which instils a sense of discipline and service largely lacking in industry, has
obliged him to put behind him, and therefore discount and forget, certain anxieties that affect the civilian acutely. This is a gain to the soldier, and worth many shillings a week. Loss of employ- ment, illness, removal to areas far from his home, vulnerability to bombing, increasing difficulties of domestic and personal life, the problem of maintaining his standard of living in a narrowing market —all these constitute fears and dangers which do not to the same extent besEt the soldier, whose needs are largely catered for by great organisations within the Army itself. It is true that the married man with children has many of these factors to contend with, and I would not deny that his is the hardest case of all.
There has been a great deal of exaggeration and generalisation from isolated cases of young men exempted from national service who are reputed to earn high wages for relatively unskilled work. The single cases that I have come across are all accompanied by quite reasonable explanations, and the facts generally are indisputable, namely, that reasonable rates prevail throughout this class. It is idle to say that we ought to have started this war with complete conscription of labour at fixed rates. To do so would have caused a revolution in industrial life at a time when harmony was as necessary as it is today. It would have involved the conscription of capital and property to an equal extent, and this at a time when the Government was only calling on the resources of the country to the then low limit of 2o-25 per cent. ; justification for arbitrary measures in such circumstances would have been difficult to prove. Now that this figure is raised to 6o-7o per cent. there is a far greater chance of assent to State interference with hours, wages and conditions of work, and, indeed, we are seeing regulations made almost daily with comparative harmony on all sides which would have caused acute controversy and dislocation three years ago. This is a point of paramount importance to be appreciated by the soldier, who today argues rather differently in battle-dress from what he used to do in overalls.
The Government has now become directly or indirectly by far the greatest employer of labour in the country, greater indeed than all other employers combined in the years just before the war. It still proceeds to hand out rewards for service to its direct and indirect employees on a different basis. It lays down a fixed scale of pay for the services of one, and it negotiates through the pricing of contracts for the products of the other. It requires the best efforts of both. Is it justified any longer in pursuing these different methods? I do not think so. We can rightly argue that, mobilisa- tion having proceeded to the point it has, and the gravity of the war being what it is, we ought increasingly to see that the two great classes of State servants are treated more alike.
The stage is set. The Government through taxation and other compulsory powers has taken " operational " if not legal control over land, plant, investments and other forms of capital. Capital is conscripted in fact if not in name. Moreover, the evils of exces- sive wages in a rationed world are beginning to be manifest. There is mounting evidence of absenteeism based purely on the over- adequacy of wages. Money is ceasing to be an incentive to effort. The pay-packet is becoming divorced from the number of man- hours spent on the lathe. Finally, there is an ever-growing demand for a new outlook towards service pay and pensions, a desire to make a career in the fighting services—and who knows that it may not represent a lifetime for many thousands?—attractive and secure from the financial point of view, a hope that the spearhead of a militant nation may not become tarnished through the forgetfulness of its citizens or the dilatoriness of its Government.
The duty of the Government is plain. It is to re-orientate the great stream of national finance, to hold the flood going into industry at the volume which it has now reached—indeed, in certain channels to restrain it a little—and, by adopting a more inspired policy towards service pay, to release a new flow of goodwill to the fight- ing services where freedom from financial anxiety is of so much importance in maintaining morale. If this change in policy is brought about it will, I am convinced, result in a higher sense of united service and of united purpose in this war.
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