TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE STRIKE AT THE DOCKS.
THEgreat strike of the last ten days has in it aspects at once humiliating and encouraging. It is humiliating to see that there is so little knowledge of the exact conditions under which this mighty city is fed, that when something goes wrong, there must be all this blind groping about for the source of the mischief, nobody being able to lay his finger on the spot where the social system is at fault. The electrician can tell almost exactly where the fault lies in an electric cable that ceases to perform its work rightly, though that fault may be buried under a mile or two of salt water nearly a thousand leagues away. But in, our human arrangements it is very different. Every one knows that something is wrong, but whether the intruding atoms which embarrass the mighty system of linked human lives and actions, are here or there, no one can tell us with any authority till after the city has been suffering for a week or two from the disorders into which all its energies have been thrown. One great authority throws the blame on the shipowners, another throws it on the dockyard directors, a third on the sweaters or gangers, a fourth on the casual labourers ; and the process by which the truth is at last found out is more like the process by which dust is got out of a watch,—by taking the whole network of wheels to pieces and cleaning them all separately,—than it is like the process by which the fault in an electric cable is dis- covered at the bottom of the ocean hundreds of miles away. This is the humiliating aspect of the great spec- tacle we have been witnessing. On the other hand, there is an encouraging aspect, too, in the spectacle, of a great army of labour, amounting to nearly a hundred thousand men, not under the discipline of officers or any sharp and stern law, confining itself so strictly to demonstrations of moral force, and showing hardly even any disposition to indulge in the reckless waste of property and idle rage of passion which would have distinguished such a mighty disorganisation of labour as this but a very few years ago. The many evil suggestions which must flash through the minds of the idle and dis- solute as they see the power of the working classes, have appeared to be quite impotent, and that, too, for a time which must seem a very long one to men whose families are eager to be fed. It is impossible to deny that the working classes of this mighty city have gained enor- mously in self-restraint and sense of justice since the days when such an event as this would have been made the occasion not only for the pillage of shops and the destruc- tion of their former employers' property, but for all sorts of angry demonstrations against unpopular religions and unpopular politicians. We hardly know whether the absence of anything like scientific insight into the relations of the capital and labour on which the supply of London depends, ought to cause us the more discomposure, or our admiration for the self-restraint of the dissatisfied labourers ought to cause us the more satisfaction. On the whole, we think the latter feeling prevails for the present ; but if the strike lasts much longer, we shall certainly not find that the self-restraint of the men will hold out. And then the uppermost feeling in all classes will be mortification at our ignorance of the system on which capital and labour are related in this great city, and at the hap-hazard way in which we must proceed to discover the flaw when the system becomes unworkable.
Some points, however, have been made pretty clear by the discussions of the last week, one of them being that though the dock-labourers have struck when they could no longer bear the evil of low and uncertain wages, they have not struck at the time when the profits of the principal importers allowed a good margin out of which their wages might have been raised without diminishing the general demand. Mr. Sydney Buxton has suggested that a good deal of responsibility rests with the shipowners, who ought to say whether they can or cannot afford to pay a somewhat higher dock-rate, in order to supply a margin for the raising of the dock-labourers' wages. Mr. H. Lafone, in the meet- ing held at the Cannon Street Hotel on Tuesday, put the inopportuneness of the strike, so far as regards the present prices of produce, very powerfully. He "remarked upon the great difference which had taken place in the charges made in the port since the last strike in 1872, when the wages were 4d. an hour. At that time the charge for working jute was 7s. per ton. It was now is. 9d. How,. he asked, was it possible for an employer to pay 6d. or even 5d. an hour with such a reduction as that ? Gambier was us. 3d. in 1872; it was now 4s. Shellac was £2 10s. 10d. then ; now it was £1 7s. 6d. He could quote a good many other cases of a similar sort."' But it is always so. When the men are underpaid, the pressure on them comes to a climax just at the moment when there is least chance of applying a remedy which will seem fair to the other classes involved. If we had but had a better knowledge of the working of our system, the rise from 4d. to 5d. an hour gained in 1872 would not have contented the dock-labourers, who might then have demanded the 6d. that they now demand with much less hardship to those out of whose profits they would in the end have been paid.
But while all parties seem to be agreed that there are some great grievances under which the dock-labourers. suffer which might be and ought to be removed,—especially the evil system under which small middlemen carry off a. great part of the men's wages, and are even said to pay away some of them in bribes to the employers or the- employers' foremen who gave them the contract; and while it is generally admitted that the night-work,—that is, the work between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m.,—should be paid at a higher rate than the day-work, the real pinch of the situation is the demand, on which the men seem to be inexorable, that the wages of casual dock-labourers shall be raised from 5d. to 6d. an hour. The great question is,—Can the Dock Directors afford to concede this, or had they better just shut up the docks altogether ? We see a good deal of evidence in the various letters which have been published that this is not a proposal which need be absolutely rejected, if the docks were but managed on the reasonable principle of writing-off as wasted the capital sunk in obsolete arrangements not really suited to the general steam navigation system of the present day. Whether we compare the system adopted at the Liverpool docks with the system adopted at the London docks, or compare the speeches and letters of the great shipowners with the statements of the Dock Directors, it is difficult not to come to the same conclusion, that the Dock Directors are really struggling hard to keep their heads above water because they will not frankly admit that a great deal of capital has been sunk in arrangements which are not at all suited to the steamships of the present time. Mr. Sutherland, in his interesting letter to Thursday's Times, says :—" Probably one-half of the capital outlay of the London and St. Katherine Dock and the East and West India Docks Company may be considered obsolete for all practical purposes in connection with shipping; but still the dock authorities are under the obligation to endeavour to make a profit on this unproductive outlay, either by economising in their labour expenditure, or increasing the dues now levied upon goods and shipping." That we believe to be the economical explanation of the Dock Companies' non possumus in reply to the demand for a higher rate of labour ; and it points to the competition of the suggested Co-operative Dock Company, or to the superseding of the present Dock Companies by a Dock Trust, as the true solu- tion of the present difficulty. The same reform is suggested by the very instructive comparison made in Friday's Times between the general policy of the Liverpool docks and the general policy of the London docks, which seems to be in almost every respect so unfavourable to the latter. What we hope to see is a system in which the dock-labourer gets his 6d. an hour, and is not liable to be dismissed after once being engaged, without at least 2s. in his pocket, and in which none of his wages shall go to the sweater, much less in the way of bribe to the foreman who engages the sweater. But further, we should like to see the worst class of dock-labourers,—those who do not really earn good wages,—altogether discouraged, and thrown back on the casual wards of the workhouses, or any other expedients for the maintenance of our "residuum." It is far better that a limited number of hard workers should be supported in comfort than that their rate of pay should be reduced by the competition of a number of loafers who can only be got to work at all by the close supervision of a coarse and greedy middleman. So far as we can judge from the many letters published on all hands, the administration of the London docks has really been, on the whole, inefficient and petty. The Directors have tried to swell their revenue from such illegitimate sources as the trade in beer supplied out of casks trundled to the side of the workmen as they work in the docks ; and instead of assigning the various Steam Navigation Companies ipecial places for loading and unloading in their docks at given rates, and leaving all the supervision of both processes to the Ship Companies, they have insisted on unloading by their own dock-labourers, and that in a manner by no means satisfactory to the shipowners. Add to this that they have sanctioned a vicious contract system, and have not given adequate terms for night-work, and we can easily understand how it is that they have failed to satisfy both .the labourers whom they employ, and the Shipping Companies on whom they depend. There seems every reason to believe that if they did not struggle to make ill-invested capital pay a dividend to which it is no longer entitled, they might very easily concede the most important of the labourers' demands, and give greater satisfaction to their customers too. If they do not reconsider their position, and that quickly, the policy of superseding them by a Trust managed in the public interest, will soon become the only remedy for a monopoly which threatens the Port of London with a great disaster.
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