THE ENGINEERING WAR. T HE struggle in the engineering trade spreads
steadily in England. From week to week the Employers' Federation are able to report that considerable additions have been made to the number of firms adopting the lock- out policy. Notable among these accessions of late have been the great manufacturers of textile machinery at Oldham and several large houses at Sheffield. Almost everywhere, and especially in the case of the last-named city, the stoppage of works has occurred at a time of unusually good employment. Profits, which were beginning to compensate capitalists for many years of unproductive- ness, are thrown aside, with no assured prospect whatever of its being possible to return to them even if victory be obtained in the struggle. On the contrary, it is admitted that foreign orders which would have been placed here are being largely sent abroad, and that when custom has once been thus transferred it is often very difficult, if not im- possible, to recover it. So grave do the consequences already flowing from their own action appear to some of the employers that there is a rumoured intention on the part of an important Leeds firm to resort to that desperate remedy, the importation of foreign workmen. Another very considerable house in the same centre is still more credibly reported to be contemplating the removal of its whole establishment to Germany. That, no doubt, is a possible course on the part of great in- dividual firms here and there. But, obviously, it is a. very costly course, and one which can only be undertaken where there is a large amount of surplus capital. Nor can it be supposed that foreign countries would welcome the introduction of an unlimited number of English capitalists, to take the bread out of the mouths of their own carefully protected employers. It is only a very small proportion of the engineering houses of Great Britain that can hope to make a fresh start abroad, if through the diversion of foreign custom, due to a prolonged cessation of British production, there should be a per- manent reduction in the possibilities of the profitable em- ployment of capital in engineering here.
Are we, then, to suppose that what is spreading among the engineering firms of this country is an epidemic of suicidal mania ? That would be plainly presumptuous. As a class they are very hard-headed, and by no means liable to be swept away by waves of emotion. What does seem to have happened is that they have convinced themselves, or been convinced by certain individuals of great force of character, that a situation has arisen which calls for a stand being made, at almost all risks, if they wish, in the words of Sir Benjamin Browne, one of the most moderate and liberal-minded of employers, to "save the trade." That, he says, in a letter to the Times last week, and not the "wrecking of the 'Union," is the object of the Masters' Federation, in resisting the eighiphour movement in the way in which they are resisting it. It comes, indeed, to much the same thing, for it is "the Union," and prin- cipally the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, of whose policy Sir B. Browne complains as having been for some time past inspired by aims incompatible with the pro- sperity of the engineering trade. The demand for the eight-hour day, put forward in London, is regarded, we are given to understand, as only the latest and most definite step in a long course of action, the inevitable effects of which are a reduction in the amount of work turned out and an advance in the cost of production, and therefore in the profitable selling price. Sir B. Browne mentions several illustrations of the policy in question. There is the objection raised by the Newcastle secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers to the employ- ment of a special class of overlookers at Elswick to see that the machines of that company produce as much as possible. There is "hostility to piece-work, the ob- jection to one man working two machines, however simple, the objection to the employment of low-paid men" on more or less automatic machines, "the increasing tendency of workmen to run machines slowly, and the tendency (to put it mildly) to look coldly on the introduction of new economies and labour-saving appliances." Plainly, so far as these " objections " and " tendencies " operate—and. we have seen no repudiation of them—they must result in keeping down the standard of production in respect of quantity, and keeping up the prices at which British engineering employers can safely contract to supply engines and machinery. And when, on the top of all that, there comes a demand for the reduction by a ninth of the hours actually spent at work, alarm is not unnatural in the masters. Obviously such a demand must be looked at quite differently, when coming from men whose organisa- tions have exhibited a systematic desire to keep down production, from the light in which it might have been regarded if those men and their organisations had been setting themselves to turn out all that was possible in their working hours.
It is just to the masters to make this acknowledgment, though not even by Sir Benjamin Browne can we be persuaded—if, indeed, which we somewhat doubt, he is fully persuaded himself—that it was a wise proceeding to make the local demand for an eight-hour day in London a ground for a general lock-out through the country. But though the masters are combating them in the wrong way, the tendencies working among the members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and kindred Unions are clearly wrong in principle. In essence they are identical with the machine-breaking movements of the early part of the century. If persisted in, they will inevitably result, as Sir Edward Reed contends in the Times of Tuesday, in making British competition with Germany and the United States impracticable. We do not say that the motives inspiring the policy described by • Sir B. Browne are by any means all bad. A good many workmen, in desiring to keep down the standard of pro- duction in respect of quantity, are influenced by the wish to "expand the field of labour" expressed by Mr. Maddison at the Hyde Park demonstration last Sunday. They are willing to earn less themselves in order that there may be work for others to do. But their earning less, if they are good workmen, means that the employer's plant produces less in a given time, and that he has to ask higher prices than he need, and so to suffer as compared with his foreign rival. And the end of it must be that there will be less, and not more, employment to go round here. Besides, this keeping down of production can only be done generally by organised shirking, and that is organised immorality. In the great Unions connected with the shipbuilding and cotton trades nothing of the kind prevails, and they are less, and not more, exposed to dangerous foreign competi- tion than British engineering is. Why, then, should the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and allied Societies pursue a policy which is bound to fail in the long-run, and which, if it succeeded, could only do so at the cost of an injury to the moral fibre of the workmen concerned ? It is clearly not for us to suggest terms of settlement for the great struggle now going forward, but it is at least certain that the public renunciation by engineering Unions of the principle and practice of shirking would do not a little to promote a pacific issue, with some promise of permanence.
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