Who are the masters now?
If—as seems likely as we go to press—the Government goes back on its earlier agree- ment in principle to the BOAC take-over of British United Airways and forbids the merger, one man will be able to claim the credit for having saved BUA for private enterprise. It is, however, unlikely that he will wish to do so; for that man is the chairman of the union side of the National Joint Council for Civil Air Transport— better known as Mr Clive Jenkins.
It was Mr Jenkins's arrogant and loud- mouthed threat, last week-end, that the unions would refuse to allow any other independent airline to take over BUA, whose present owners are determined to sell, which created an entirely new political situation. It was humiliating enough for the elected government to have openly to surrender to trade union pres- sure over Mrs Barbara Castle's 'In place of strife' proposals. To allow it to appear as if the unions could go on to dictate to the Government the pattern of the nation's aviation industry would be intolerable.
Moreover, a slap in the face for Clive Jenkins would not only prevent an affront to public opinion, it would also bring nothing but comfort and joy to the major- ity of other trade union leaders, who deeply detest and distrust their flamboy- ant, ambitious, left-wing colleague. And. of course, partly because of Mr Jenkins's unpopularity with other union leaders commanding far more members in the industry than he has, it was clear from the start, even to the Government, that the threat was a bluff.
In fact, it is a disgrace that the Govern- ment even went so far as to agree in prin- ciple the BOAC-BUA merger. For only four months ago, in its White Paper on the future of civil aviation in Britain, it ex- plicitly accepted and endorsed the power- ful arguments advanced by the Edwards Committee for the encouragement of an effective 'second force' among the inde- pendent airlines to compete against the nationalised airlines both at home and abroad. To allow BUA. Britain's largest private airline and the only possible nucleus for any such second force, to be nationalised by take-over, would deliber- ately be to sabotage the policy to which, after two years' intensive study. the Government finally pledged itself last November.
No doubt, for his part, Mr Jenkins never expected his bluff to be called. No doubt, too, his intervention was partly designed to try and shift attention in the industry away from the genuine dispute over the employment at Heathrow of the privately-owned ground handling com- pany General Aviation Services, the British subsidiary of an American-con- trolled Canadian firm. For Mr Jenkins found himself in an embarrassing position over GAS. As chairman of the union side of the National Joint Council for Civil Air Transport he had already approved the British Airports Authority's decision to grant a concession to GAS (he has since denied this, but the men, as well as the employers, are convinced that it is true). It was only after the men themselves, led by their shop stewards. declared GAS un- acceptable that Mr Jenkins hurriedly changed his tune.
Now whereas the simultaneous strike by the Transport and General Workers' Union over firemen's pay at Heathrow is just another conventional industrial dis- pute, made interesting chiefly because it happens to be at London Airport, the far more widely supported GAS affair is alto- gether more significant. It seems likely that the men may well be justified in complain- ing of the way in which GAS acquired its concession. But it is hard to believe that 12.000 of them attended a mass meeting at Brentford football ground on Monday in order to demonstrate their support for the open tender system. Nor is there any genuine cause for concern over jobs (although there were some complaints at the meeting over working conditions, one shop steward complaining that the men's car parks were too far away from their place of work. It's enough to make a pen- sioner weep).
Nor, again, although the shop stewards have exploited to the full the fact that GAS is a private company hoping to make a profit and (as if that were not bad enough) foreign-owned to boot, not even this is really what the dispute is about. At bottom, like the parallel strike in the docks, it is a deliberate showdown to determine who is to be master at London Airport : the union leadership or the British Air- ports Authority. And the union leadership in this context means the real union leadership at Heathrow: not Mr John Cousins of the TGwti, still less Mr Jenkins, but the unofficial inter-union so-called 'air- port liaison committee' of Heathrow shop stewards.
When, a few months ago. Mrs Castle informed the Institute of Directors that power in industry now resided on the shop floor, she was uttering a warning that should not have gone unheeded—although it is difficult to understand why she sounded so pleased about it. For while increased militancy on the part of estab- lished trade union leaders may bring infla- tion and the advancement of the strong at the expense of the weak, at least it con- fines itself to the traditional industrial field of pay and conditions. When the torch of militancy is taken over by unofficial groups of shop stewards the rule book is thrown away: any objective, however political it may be. is fair game if the men can be brought to support it. Mr Jenkins may have chosen the wrong issue, but he can see which way the wind is blowing.
More than ever, therefore, it does matter who is to be master—Parliament and the public interest, or the sectional interests with the biggest power of blackmail. And at the present time the Government has, amid all the militancy, the perfect oppor- tunity to restore order in industry and re- assert the supremacy of the national inter- est over the sectional. It is no accident that the worst trouble usually occurs (as at Heathrow) where the industrial framework is either wholly or partly nationalised. For, while the private employer cannot be pushed too hard or he will go out of busi- ness altogether. wherever the Government has any influence its instinct is invariably to go for a settlement at any price (how- ever much it may hesitate and huff and puff on the way). And a major cause of this institutionalised cowardice has, in the past, been the fear of the damage that a prolonged strike (whether in the docks, Heathrow or wherever) would do to Britain's vulnerable balance of payments.
Today, thanks to devaluation, the bal- ance of payments is unusually strong. There is much else that needs to be done to reform industrial relations. There are also many uses for a balance of payments surplus. But the Government could not put its present surplus to better or more timely use than in providing the finance to enable it at long last to stand up to unjustified demands on the part of the increasingly aggressive militants in the public sector, however long the strikes that may result.
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