THE DOCKER'S SPANNER
HE London dockers have struck so often, and almost always for reasons so inadequate, that any comment on their behaviour must sound repetitive. Condenination of their disregard for negotiation, and for the interests of them- selves, their families and- the country sounds as hackneyed as the, usual sentimentality abotit the strength of their personal loyalties—loyalties which are, as usual, confused, mis- applied and cynically exploited. And yet the root evils have never been effectively attacked. They are the multiplication and con- fusion of " authorities " on the one hand, and on the other an utterly inexcusable readiness of the dockers themselves to use the strike weapon as the answer to any and every difficulty. It is the same old spanner automatically thrown into an over-complicated and inefficient. machine. That means that there are two necessities. The first—and there is no sense in mincing words about it—is to bring the London dockers to their senses. They are behaving like fools and they are being exploited by rogues, and the whole thing has 'gone on for so long that the public is thoroughly sick of it. When the public is made to suffer because of a dispute within the Transport and General Workers' Union about three men expelled —and rightly expelled—for the part they played in the Communist- inspired strike of last July the limit has been reached. There is no real reason why the London Dock Labour Board should hesitate to apply the sternest measures at its command. It should surely be plain by now that vacillation and half-measures have no deterrent effect whatever at the London docks.
The answer is not the drafting in of troops to keep the port at work. It is not the warning, repeated by Lord Ammon, the chair- man of the National Dock Labour Board, and this time not denied by the Government, that the whole dock labour scheme is being jeopardised. It is certainly not the tiresome trade-union argument, repeated by the Minister of Labour, that the matter had better be left to be settled quietly by the "experts." That argument is as thin as Mr. Isaacs' earlier assurances, delivered with all the massive calm of a man who does not know what is going on, that the " vast majority " of the London dockers were behaving reasonably. They were not, are not, and will not be until they are taught that the strike weapon is only a weapon of last resort—not a cosh for every docker •to carry under his coat- all the time. That lessbn must be driven home first, but at the same time a thorough and compre- hensive inquiry into conditions at the London Docks must bs made, and its results published, so that the causes of disputes may be reduced and the whole matter exposed to the light of day.
