S UPERFICIALLY the railway strike that is to come, if the
footplate men refuse to be mollified, bears some resem- blance to the newspaper strike that has just concluded. Both disputes arose over differentials—over the size of the tribute that industry pays to skill. In both, the issue lies as much between different unions as between unions and employers; but in both, friction between unions and employer helped to 'stir up the degree of resentment that makes strike action seem reasonable to the strikers, even when it is clearly unreasonable to the public.
But there is a deeper and more significant resemblance. In both cases, the unions concerned decided to rely not on the justice of their case but on the strength of their bargaining power. The press electricians rejected arbitration; the foot- plate men accepted it, but seized on the first excuse that has presented itself to rept. diate the verdict. Admittedly the foot- plate men have the better case; their claim that an engine driver ought to be a relatively better-paid member of society is generally accepted. But as Mr. Arthur Deakin has told them, 'When you accept arbitration, you accept the decision when it is reached'—for if you do not, public confidence in the unions' good faith is diminished. t, of arriving at wage settlements needs an overhaul. And that, incidentally, is the chief reason why the ETU executive climbed down so quickly and ignominiously this week. The Communists are not so purblind as to imagine that 1955, with comparative prosperity and full employment, is a good year to make their real challenge. All they aspire to do with their guerrilla campaign is to infiltrate to prepared positions, so that their challenge will be really dangerous when the time comes. But if an infiltration aroused too angry a public reaction, they might be driven out of their prepared positions altogether by a new wages policy—a prospect they do not relish.
Nor do they want to antagonise the other unions; but this, they found, was exactly what the newspaper strike succeeded in doing. From the start, the London Typographical Society was angry; its journal sourly commented on the 'deplorable state of affairs' when a few electricians and engineers can endanger the positions of approximately 15,000 people, 'with- out one word of explanation to their fellow trade unionists. We can understand an air of reticence where the employers arc concerned, but we would have thought that at the very least there would always be respect between one union and another.'
Respect between one union and another? How.can there be, when one of them allows its affairs to be run by a handful of Communists, whose loyalty is not to the trade union move- ment, or even to the members who elected them (and continue to elect them), but to the party?
Even when the Communist Party is not directly concerned, inter-union solidarity is being disrupted by the differentials dispute; the National Union of Railwaymen have been quick to express their irritation at the footplate men's strike threat. Still, differentials present a problem that the TUC should handle itself. Serious though it is, it is much less sinister than the problem of union Communism. Perhaps now that the press has had first-hand evidence of the party game, it will devote some of the assiduity which has been given to more ephemeral subjects to a study of industrial relations—its own in particular.
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