Back to the Luddites
While the T.U.C. is enunciating sound principles, and re-empha- sising them impressively in a fresh statement published on Thursday, one union, the Tobacco Workers', is adopting a line calculated to strike despair into anyone bent on believing in the intelligence and goodwill of trade unionists. The Imperial Tobacco Company, pursuing, as every enterprising firm must and should, methods for increasing output and efficiency, has introduced into its factory certain new machinery which will enable cutting machines to be tended by one man instead of three. That, say the men promptly, will create unemployment, and in return they demand the institu- tion of a 4o-hour instead of a 45-hour week. Here, openly and nakedly, is a barrier thrown up against industrial progress, in the spirit, if not by the methods, in which the Luddites a century and more ago broke up the new frames in the cotton-mills because more machinery meant less manual labour. It is plain as noonday that the adoption by workers generally of an attitude like that of the Tobacco Workers would mean the end of all hope of economic recovery with or without Marshall Aid and O.E.E.C. Here is a little more educational work to be done by the General Council of the T.U.C.
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