Psychologist's Nightmare
By our Industrial Correspondent
WHAT we have done at our conference,' said a building trade unionist this week, 'is to bring a lot of our inhibitions into the open.' As far as inhibitions are concerned, the trade-union world is a psychologist's nightmare, and if the conference of nineteen building unions held in London to discuss the impact of new techniques served only this purpose, it was not held in vain. Perhaps it will be an example to even more mixed- up groups, like the shipbuilders and engineers.
But there are hopes that the conference will produce wider results, most notably in changing the union structure in building. Nothing will happen quickly, but the first soundings have been taken for some kind of merger of unions catering for the 'cognate trades' of bricklaying and masonry, plastering, slating and tiling; and there' is a chance that the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers will eventually unite with the woodcutting machinists (the body which became so agitated a few months ago when the Queen was photographed standing too near a circular saw). In an industry which is changing as quickly as building, as a result of the introduction of pre- fabricated walls, glass bricks and the rest, any such simplification of demarcation boundaries would be to the good.
The building unions, perhaps because they have not gained such a powerful grip on their industry, have never been as bloody-minded about demar- cation as the shipbuilders and others. The ship- yards are giving painful birth to their new tech- niques; the Clydeside yard of Alexander Stephen and Sons has been in labour since 1948 with pre.: fabrication, and the rival midwives of the Boiler- makers' Society and the Shipwrights' Association, aided at various times by the TUC and the Ministry of Labour, only managed to reach final agreement last week on the method of delivery. Yet there are people in the shipbuilding and en- gineering unions who know that they are in danger of strangling themselves in their own de- marcation lines. Mr. George Barran, the general secretary of the confederation into which the forty unions in this field have banded themselves for wage negotiations, has several times floated the idea that the unions should be simplifying their structure. More recently Mr. John Chalmers, the Clydeside officer of' the boilermakers, revealed that even these staunch individualists see the need for mergers, and the subject will probably be discussed at their conference next month. Mr. Chalmers would like to see one union in shipbuilding for metal workers and another for the finishing trades, with fitters and labourers re- maining in their present unions because they need freedom to move to engineering, railway work- shops and elsewhere when work in the shipyards is scarce.
These are hopeful signs. So is the haste with which industries named in the black list in the recent report on restrictive practices, prepared by the Minister of Labour's advisory council, have sought to explain away their difficulties. The press, so often criticised for its treatment of industrial relations, has at least managed, by holding its magnifying mirror up to hole-boring and the like, to make this kind of unrighteous- ness risible. But there is no room for complacency while the Transport and General Workers' Union shop stewards at the Jaguar factory in Coventry can, with straight faces, declare that they will 'refuse to work with members of unions who are refusing to work with members of other unions.'
The press and the public often go wrong in failing to see the fears—sometimes quite reason- able fears—which lie beneath the surface of restrictive practices. For example, a process of facsimile printing designed in Britain has been tried out for the first time by a chain of Japanese newspapers; yet it is generally Acknow- ledged that if the unions in Britain allowed this process, which confines type-setting to a single centre, to be adopted by all the national news- papers, there would be much less employment for linotype operators and others in the provinces. But what is admirable about the building unions' attitude is that it is positive. In place of the rather shame-faced restrictiveness of other industries, where the whole object of the unions is to avoid any discussion of the subject, the builders have put a quite frank admission that they are afraid of the uncontrolled introduction of the new materials and devices which, they say, are some- times just dumped down on the site without any- one having any idea about who is to use them. They are all anxious that every process connected with building should continue to be carried out by the million and more men already in the industry; and, considering the heavy unemploy- ment among them last winter, this is not an entirely unreasonable demand. The unions, too, are actually approaching their employers for joint discussions how new methods can be most smoothly introduced, and they are even talking of a more elaborate research and publicity or- ganisation inside the National Federation of Building Trade Operatives so that the unions can form and propagate their own opinions on which of the new materials are worth using.
It would be a pleasing sign that courage begets courage if the General Council of the TUC, which has been having discussions with the building, printing and engineering federations on union structure and co-operation, were to do a little straight talking on demarcation and allied subjects in its report to this year's Congress at Blackpool in September. But tradition is all against it. Internal matters are always 'progressed' cautiously at the TUC. It is only when giving advice to employers, Chancellors of the Ex- chequer and foreign governments that a rapporteur can really let himself go.
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