VERDICT : GUILTY
HIS has been a strike not for higher wages, but for power.' The Spectator's original diagnosis of the news- paper dispute has been amply confirmed by the report of the Government's Court of Inquiry, published on Wednes- day. The court's view was that the precipitate action of the local union representatives in calling an unofficial strike was `unjustified.' and the wage claim on which the action was taken `unrealistic.' The only justification that the court could find for the strikers was that their unions were not adequately recognised in negotiations; it suggested that this defect should be remedied in future by the creation of a new central body, representing all press workers in discussions on wages and conditions. The court urged, however, that pending the estab- lishment of this central, negotiating body and its examination of the industry's wage structure, the strikers should return to work, without prejudice, on the basis of the employers' present offer.
a • • Within the limits which these government courts of inquiry observe, this verdict is reasonable. The court avoided the mis- take made by the Court of Inquiry into the railways dispute of thinking that its function was conciliation—that its aim was to settle the dispute. It was not. The aim of such inquiries is to reveal to the public what is happening in the industry, and why. The newspaper report sensibly observes that limitation. Never- the less it is open to serious criticism. In striving to be strictly impersonal and factual, it misses the whole point. For a report on the newspaper strike not to mention that the Electrical Trades Union is run by Communists, and that the Newspaper Proprietors' Association is a securely welded `ring' might be construed as a sign of determined objectivity; but it can also be described as a sign of wilful blindness. For if this dispute was not really concerned with wages, it must have had other causes; and Merely to state that the electricians and engineers had a weak wages case does not'carry anybody any further.
The strike, we repeat,.was for power. The fact that it was originally unofficial should not deceive anybody into imagining that the officials of the electricians' and engineers' union were asleep, They wanted it to be unofficial, to start with, in order that they might be able to prove that this was no deep-laid Communist plot, but a spontaneous outburst of genuine union disaffection. And in one sense they were right, it was. The ill-feeling among the electricians and the engineers—the main- tenance men—in the press has been growing for a long time; ill-feeling shared, it has to be admitted, by many of the in- dustry's workers. Admittedly the Court of Inquiry could not fully have investigated this disaffection in the short time it had at its disposal; but no verdict on the dispute can claim to be comprehensive which does not make allowances for the failure of the newspaper proprietors to create the good relations that they so often advocate for other industries.
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A further criticism of the report is that it misses what should have been an excellent opportunity to dispose of the fallacious reasoning on which the maintenance men's claims was based. `Unrealistic' is a fair description : but the court might have gone on to explain why. The community is now thoroughly confused by all the ingenious rationalisations with which wage claims are pressed : and the ETU's. in particular, deserve attention. That union based its claim on the fact that elec- tricians in the press have always received what amounts to preferential treatment, not because their work is more difficult or arduous than that of electricians in other industries, but because they happened to receive more in the thirties. But if the demand had been accepted, the ETU's next move would have been to demand wage increases for electricians in other industries, on,the 'rate for the, job' argument. They would have insisted that a man replacing broken electric light bulbs ought to receive the same, whomsoever he works for. This type of criss-cross argument is growing increasingly popular; and other unions will be tempted to follow the Communists' example in trying it on, if these courts do not expose it. The danger is the greater in that the policy of union wage restraint may soon dis- integrate. At the conference of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers this Easter the claim for upwards of 15s. a week for all workers was not met from the platform with the usual pleas for caution; as the Manchester Guardian corre- spondent noted, `not only did nobody urge wage restraint, but no one even bothered to attack it.' That the climate of wage negotiation is changing may be due to the attitude taken by the Court.of Inquiry on the railways, which hurled economic con- siderations out of the window in favour of administrative expediency. If these courts cannot perform their proper func- tion of illuminating and guiding public opinion, they had better not be asked to perform at all.
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