Trouble at Tilbury The popular impression that there is always
trouble with dockers, especially London dockers, and that nothing is ever done about the root causes of it, is not far from the truth. The current quarrel between a firm of master stevedores and its employees at Tilbury, over a proposal to make a small number of men permanent members of the firm's staff instead of casual workers, is only the latest manifestation of an old problem which has exercised dock employers and workers for many years and last led to a major strike in London as recently as April, 1950. The apparently innocuous desire to give certain men—usually the most reliable and vigorous—permanent employment is always interpreted by some dockers as a device for -pushing the weaker men to the wall. It is attacked, in other words, because it does not share the work out equally among good and bad, weak and strong, energetic and lazy. The arguments that the good worker • deserves his reward, that there is no virtue in levelling down, and that the man who cannot get enough work at the docks can find plenty elsewhere have little weight with the aggrieved dockers. They cling to the casual labour system. In the present case they are working to rule not only to prevent the firm in question fibm taking on 44 permanent men (the men themselves have, in any case, offered to drop the arrangement) but also to prevent the same firm from trying to do the same thing later on—and this despite the decision of the Joint Indus- trial Council that the employment of permanent men is in order. It is hardly surprising that the London Shipowners' Dock Labour Committee has refused to employ men who go slow. But a head-on clash will not solve this problem. The only thing it is likely to do is to bring the work of the port to a standstill, penalise the shipping trade and the public in general—the usual sufferers—and end with yet another patched-up settlement. The basic problem will still be there. There is still no easy way of removing it, but an essential first step to its removal is the institu- tion of a comprehensive official inquiry into the present dock labour system.
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