SOME LESSONS OF THE STRIKE, I T takes a thousand pounds
a day to maintain twenty thousand idle men in full health and strength, to pay their rent, and to provide even for a, small propor- tionate average of wives and children. Some forty thousand men at least were thrown out of work by the strike at the docks, and though the public were liberal, and the Trades- Unions sympathetic, neither charity nor comradeship can keep up a contribution of two thousand. pounds every twenty-four hours. It was inevitable, therefore, that if the employers held out, the men must yield ; and we may, we think, consider that they have shown the first signs of yielding, and that in a few more hours or days the sus- pension of labour which has so gravely threatened the prosperity of London will, for a time, be at an end. The strike, however, though it has partially failed, has not been altogether useless. The men have obtained some great advantages, having got rid of the sub-contracts which pressed so heavily on their wages, having modified. to some extent, the " casual " system, so that if employed at all, they get a minimum wage of 2s. a day, and having acquired some experience greatly required both as to their strength for resistance and their weakness. They are strong, for they can stop trade ; but they are weak, because without public help they can stop it only for a few hours. The public, moreover, has learned some lessons, of which these two, one local and one general, seem to us the most important. It is time the system of providing labour for the docks of London were finally done away, even if the State has to interfere to do it. Right in the centre of the com- plicated organisation of London commerce, with their fingers, as it were, on the valves of the heart of trade, the dock companies maintain a system of collecting labour as dangerous to the State and the community as it is oppressive and merciless to the labourers. They have spent too much to expect a reasonable return, and in order to do their work with extreme rapidity, yet at the lowest cost, they dig, as it were, a reservoir or cesspool of casual labour. Into this float all the masterless men of the country with strong backs, many of them good. labourers out of work, many of them, with no capacity but . physical strength, many of them unhung ruffians, whose death would be a blessing to the body politic, a sweltering undisciplined half-fed crowd, large enough to recruit an army, from among whom the dock foremen, from hour to hour, clutch the supply of force they want. There never was such a system in a civilised country, or such a waste of human power. Thousands of men waste six hours a day in waiting to be employed for the other six ; not one man in three is sufficiently paid, taking one week with another, and not one man in sixty enjoys the security without which life becomes to all but the utterly reckless a mere burden. It is a. sort of lottery of labour which has been created, and so bad is the method that an increase in the prizes will, probably, only increase the suffering of the ticket-holders ; for if the docks paid a shilling an hour, the rush from all England for the chance would only be multiplied five-fold. Not one of the conditions which sweeten, or elevate, or mitigate hard toil, is, or can be, secured ; while the severest of all compulsion, that of a direct chance of hunger, is perpetually present. The only wonder is that such men, collected in such crowds to play in such a lottery, and to suffer, as thousands of them do, such a torment of perpetual waiting, are as quiet as they usually are, or as amenable when they strike to any sort of control short of military force. The whole system ought to be swept away, and we rejoice to believe that, as a consequence of the strike, there is at least a chance that this reform will be carried through. The men who under any natural system would provide for the loading and unloading of ships are the shipowners, who control every other incident of maritime conveyance ; and Sir Donald Currie, the most experienced and success- ful of the class, says they are ready to do it. They will pay the dock owners for the accommodation they provide, but they will do the work with their own men, in their own way, taking their own time. Being thus independent, they can, they say, pay better wages, and all their habits and traditions will incline them towards the maintenance of regular forces, and the use of casual labour only when they are too hard driven, a matter over which, moreover, they can exercise much more control in the way of regulating arrivals than the dock owners can. The latter say they are willing to accede to this arrangement, and though we suspect when it comes to the point that the dispute on the question of payments will be a very bitter one, still, it is probable that an arrangement will be made. We only wish it might go much further, and that a shipowners' syndicate would lease all the docks, and work them in the general interest of the shipping trade. They would have then a double interest in preventing strikes, would be able in a certain degree to regulate arrivals, would have a, large supply of permanent labour, and would be able at least to try whether casual labour, which is pure evil alike to the class employed and the community, could not be wholly dispensed with. We defer at once to experts in the matter ; but we can see no reason why a large picked force of men should not be maintained, say with a guaranteed wage of 2s. a day, the remaining money to come from the performance of piecework, just as it does now. There would then be a contented dock service in which discipline might be severe because dismissal would be a dreaded penalty, all the men would be competent men, and the time expended on the work, which is, of course, money, might be even less than at present. Machinery, too, might be employed.
on a more extensive scale, and much of the " carrying ' be done by an agency at once less costly and less mutinous than human labour. To hear of thousands of tons of grain being carried. by men from ship to warehouse makes one think of ancient Egypt, not of a day of rails and electricity.
The other lesson which the public will have to take to heart is that it is the unskilled. and half-skilled labour of the country which is discontented. They think too ex- clusively of skilled. workmen, whose lot, on the whole, if only they had a little more security against bad times and old age, would not be hard one, and too little of the mere labourers. There are, however, hundreds of thousands of men' in the country who bring little but their strength into the market, who are as essential to the skilled class as the hodmen are to masons, or the stokers to en- gineers, and who, as education advances, are just begin- ning to think that they are overworked and underpaid. Many of them are both. They are not worth as much as the skilled men, for the latter sell intelligence as well as labour ; but they are worn out much more rapidly, and in the cities their wages are in proportion docked much more severely by inevitable expenses. Rent, in particular, falls on them with cruel weight,—they often pay a fifth of theft wages for this item, where their superiors pay a tenth,— they want as much food, even if it be rougher, and they have as much need of clothing and of warmth. It is from them that the next trouble will come, and we believe that under the conditions of our civilisation they can, in many instances, plead a genuine grievance. They barely get the comfort of the workhouse while labouring all day to keep off the rates. They have few of the alleviations which make the lot of the agricultural labourer endurable, and are in fact often in the position of serfs of the social system, paid for severe toil only with the permission to exist. Those who know them best, their fellow workmen of the higher grades, are beginn;eg strongly to sympathise with them in their complaints, as was shown throughout this strike, and they themselves are becoming more reasonable and less violent beings, and therefore appeal more strongly to the comprehension and the sympathy of the more thoroughly civilised classes. They are beginning to strike everywhere, generally as we notice for an average of 2s. additional per week, and employers at large, that is the whole body of the community, will have, we suspect, to bear that increase, and save it if they must, in greater economy of methods of doing work. It is vain to say that competition exclusively will settle the rate for any such work, for we do not leave competition to settle it. We grant bare food and shelter to all who apply ; and, consequently, the man who works all day, however rough his labour may be, must be paid in something, however little, more than bare shelter and food. The suffering of the whole body of English workers is often exaggerated, sometimes absurdly so, their true grievances at present being mainly cramped lodging and insecurity in employment; but there are classes of the half-skilled—deserving classes, too—who have very rough times. Nothing but the amazing cheapness of food has prevented us from hearing more of them before, and now their scale of wants is rising, like that of the rest of the world. It is time for employers and the community to be very moderate and reasonable in considering their claims, and trying whether the loss in an increase of wages may not be made up by saving in the organisation of work.
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