Unemployment: queer portents

Eric Jacobs

It used to be that the television cameras and the industrial reporters were round every second week at 8 St James's Square, where Mr Robert Carr now has his office and where for years successive Ministers of Labour have presided over that cumbersome ritual by which national strikes are generally averted. My own sourest memories are of the railwaymen who, in the early 'sixties, used to provide us with a regular cliff-hanger beginning about this time of year entitled 'Will the Trains be Running at Christmas?' They always did, but not before union leaders had visited Downing Street. In a good year they would be treated to a homily from Mr Macmillan on the subject of Passchendaele, after which what choice had they but to go back to work?

All that has changed. In seventeen months of office Mr Carr has only intervened personally in three disputes — the docks, electricity supply and the Post Office. The job no longer seems to be the bed of nails that Mr Ray Gunter christened it. Instead, the cameras are nowadays round at the Department of Trade and Industry, where Mr John Davies hangs out. It is Mr Davies who seems to be doing all the talking with union leaders. Notably, of late, Mr Danny McGarvey. Poor Mr Davies.

This change is partly due to government policy and partly to chance. Mr Carr has deliberately stood aside from the industrial struggle. He wants unions and management to get used to settling their own problems and not always to rely on the good offices of his office. They must learn to stand on their own two feet like everybody else, must they not? And of course Upper Clyde Shipbuilders just happened to go bust, leaving Mr Davies to pick up the pieces, of which the most slippery are Mr McGarvey's boilermakers.

But there is more to it than chance, or even government policy. For we are now, I believe, going through some kind of deep transformation in both the sources and the style of industrial conflicts and tension. The shift of interest from Mr Carr to Mr Davies is merely symbolic of this. What exactly is going on is so far obscure. But consider what is happening to strikes and to unemployment.

There have been fewer strikes under the Tories than there were under Labour, it is true. In Labour's last year there were 4,000 strikes; in the Conservatives' first there were 2,700. In the first eight months of 1970 there were 2,880 strikes; in the first eight months of 1971 there were 1,540. Again, in the first eight months of this year about one-third fewer workers went on strike than did so in the same period last year. These are Mr Carr's own figures.

And yet the number of working days lost through strikes, the key indicator in these matters, remains staggeringly high. What we are seeing are bigger and better strikes, but fewer of them. This was the pattern that was expected to emerge under Mr Carr's Industrial Relations Act, which does something to discourage the unofficial striker, but tends conversely to encourage the big, set-piece engagement. Yet the pattern has emerged long before Mr Carr's Act has become effective law. Clearly, something is going on for which nobody has planned.

What? There are any number of possible reasons why there should be fewer strikes, including perhaps reason itself, but there is one obvious one — unemployment. A man does not so readily put job A at risk when there is no job B to turn to. Which brings us, conveniently, to my second point, the new nature of the unemployment problem.

The level of unemployment, as it grinds upwards towards the one million mark, is unacceptable' to Mr Barber and 'intolerable 'to Mr Carr, as they put it at the party conference, thus, incidentally, making a nice demonstration of the emotional difference between them. But they should also have said it was rather puzzling.

The absolute level of unemployment might have been lower if only the Treasury forecasts a year ago had not signalled caution to Ministers. The odd hundred thousand could have been lopped off the total by now, which would have given us a better chance of avoiding the dreaded 1,000,000 figure at the beginning of next year.

But the figures would still have been puzzling. Their size has merely emphasized their strangeness. For within the grand totals some new curiosities lurk.

Graduates, school-leavers and older executive types are in trouble. So too are various new areas of the country. Coventry, for instance, has been seen to excede the national average for unemployment. Coventry, I can hear you say, not Coventry surely, not England's very own boom town? Yes, indeed. Coventry it is. And if Coventry has the dole queue, which of us can be safe?

There are other queer signs and portents too numerous to go into here, like what is happening to vacancies and the amount of time men now spend between jobs. Some of this can be put down to such things as changes in unemployment benefit and redundancy pay. But not all of it, not by a long chalk.

There are two plausible theories at hand. First, we may be going through the longawaited shake-out of British industry, the shake-out which will leave each man actually doing a day's work when it's all over rather than perhaps half a day or even less. The older industries started the process years ago — textiles, pits, railways and so forth; now it is the turn of the newer ones. The older industries happened to be located in those fringe parts of the country that are hypocritically described as development areas; the newer industries are located elsewhere, especially in the Midlands, and they may yet earn the awful development title for their districts.

Second, we may be moving towards a situation where unemployment is permanently much higher than we have been used to since the war, a situation in which more and more of the community cannot find a place in its labour force because work makes demands on them which they are unable to meet.

As I say, we may. We may be going through or towards one or both of these phases. And of course we may not. I don't know, and neither does Whitehall nor the Government. It would have been wiser if Messrs Carr, Davies and Barber had admitted as much at Brighton, instead of falling back on those old stand-bys, excessive wage claims and new policies for the regions, the latter being mercifully far away down Lord Rothschild's pipeline. A little honest doubt never hurt anybody. It would at least have been more seemly than the way Ministers were seen to be falling over each other to repudiate charges of callousness toward the unemployed.

The reporters will be back at St James's Square. It would be nice to think that Ministers were getting a new set of clichés ready. We are bored with the old ones, Mr Carr, and besides we do not believe them.