Solidarity Forever
By JOHN COLE THE Prime Minister, in his talks with the rail- way unions, succeeded at least in refurbish- ing the image of Macwonder, which has become so tarnished in recent months. Yet this was, in reality, an easy victory.
The truth is that the railway unions did not want a strike. It is quite wrong to associate the victory—a narrow one—which Mr. Sidney Greene won for the settlement in his executive council, with Mr. Macmillan's stirring words the previous day on duty, the inequality of sacrifice on the Somme, and his working life as a railway- man. 1 can state authoritatively that the voting was not accompanied by the singing of either 'Tipperary' or '1 bin workin' on the railroad'; and although it has been suggested that some of the union leaders emerged starry-eyed from Ad- miralty House, it is proper to report that others could scarcely contain their laughter at the his- trionic excesses.
What the Prime Minister did, with his usual consummate skill, was to prOvide the oil which enabled the union leaders to push home this poor bargain less raucously. It is an interesting reflec- tion on the aura of office, for there can be no doubt that peace emerged less from what the Prime Minister said, than from the fact that it was he who said it. When one considers that it was Mr. Macmillan who persuaded the railway unions in 1958 to co-operate in establishing the Guillebaud Committee, and that it is his Govern- ment which has thrown that Committee's doctrine of 'comparability' out the window, the value of the source might seem to have depreciated. But the railway unions accepted his implied promises for the autumn.
It was not at all surprising that the two smaller unions did so. The Transport Salaried Staffs Association is a white-collar organisation, with 'Now repeat after me—La bombe plastique est dans le jardin de ma tante.' no tradition of militancy. The Associated Society 0.: Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, which ran the 1955 railway strike, is now a shadow of its old self, diminishing in numbers and funds. More interesting is the case of the National Union of Railwaymen. It and the Government have often indulged in the past few years in the American teenage pastime in which two aged cars are driven head-on towards each other, the driver who turns off first being stigmatised as 'chicken.' Always in the past, the Government has preferred some compromise to a national railway strike. This time the NUR has lost, and is seen by the Government to have lost.
The union had two awkward facts to consider. The first was that, although it had a first-class case for a more substantial increase than 3 per cent.—having waited for more than two years, while other unions were helping themselves to the fruits of a boom period—the process of getting it by force was likely to take the union out of its depth. The fear of a political clash with the Government has, since the London bus strike, become almost pathological among union leaders.. On that occasion, the TUC General Council saw itself faced with another 1926, and backed quickly away.
The unions in the nationalised industries have a real problem here. Assuming that the Govern- ment is going to take a closer interest in wage negotiation in future, every wage crisis can be- come a political issue. The railwaymen's problem may recur later in the year, when the NUR asks for the rest of its increase. Let us suppose that the economic position of the country has not im- proved and that the Government decides it can- not risk the renewal of general wage pressure which a final settlement with the railwaymen would produce. What will the union do? If it accepted the rebuff, its bargaining power might be permanently impaired. The possibility that the NUR will be forced into a strike, quite against its will, before the year is out cannot, therefore, be excluded.
This, however, does not allow for the second fact, which is that the rank-and-file railwaymen showed little stomach for a fight on the present occasion. The District Councils, with their strong contingents of Communists and other militants, made their usual awe-inspiring noises, but there was a significantly small number of aggressive resolutions from branches, which are nearer the ordinary workers, and many of those which did come in expressed a docile willingness to let the executive handle the dispute just as it thought best. This is not the stuff of which successful strikes are made, and Mr. Greene and his execu- tive may have been Wise to recognise it.
The probable effect of the railway settlement is that a pattern of 3 per cent. wage increases will be established this spring—which is just about what the Government aimed at, even though the White Paper's sights were set lower. There is a possibility, however, that the next round of claims, following the summer conferences, will be sub- mitted earlier than usual. This would enable other unions to sit on the tail of the hoped-for autumn settlement on the railways.
The one great spring imponderable is the action of the 3,000,000 shipbuilding and engineering workers, who are to have a second one-day token strike on March 5, and are also taking a ballot vote on whether to begin an old-fashioned time- less strike in mid-March. Will the thirty-nine unions of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions settle for 3 per cent. as well? They face two oddly assorted sets of employers. The Shipbuilding Employers' Federation are the ostentatious isolationists of British industry. But in the end they usually follow the engineering settlement.
The Engineering and Allied Employers' National Federation, by contrast, sees itself very much in its national context. It was the organisa- tion which so berated the Government for en- forcing an armistice in the last engineering strike of 1957. As the government-appointed Court of Inquiry arranged a wage increase, the Federation was led away, murmuring (in a highly offensive booklet) that it would have killed them in the next round. There is some evidence that this bitter criticism from such an influential source was what introduced the first stiffening material into the Government's attitude to wages in the Thorneycroft era. (Lord Mills is a former Presi- dent of the Engineering Federation.) Were it not for the suffering and the economic damage which a strike would cause, students of industrial relations might hope that no settlement is reached, so that we may at last see where the rank-and-file on either side stand. The unions' ballot vote will be the first proper test for many years of whether a national group of ordinary workers feels strongly enough about a wage in- crease to go on strike—to take the decision per- sonally, rather than simply follow the lead of shop stewards and union officials, whose close concern with negotiations makes them too sophis- ticated to be representative. The Confederation needs a two-thirds majority to call a strike. Even though the primitive nature of communications in some unions requires the vote to be taken at branch meetings, rather than by post, this should be a reasonably fair test.
The employers' side is equally interesting. If it comes to a strike, the unions' best hope—with the chances of government intervention slim--is to divide the opposition. It should not be forgot- ten that Ford and Vauxhall, with different nego- tiating machinery, will be at work from the start. Would the other motor firms become nervous if the strike lasted a few weeks? Would all kinds of smaller firms, in the Midlands and London, already paying well above the basic rates for their labour, feel it foolish to lose business for the sake of the comparatively small amount that will eventually be at issue? Ordinary business- men, like ordinary trade unionists, often put the personal before the general interest, provided the risks involved are not too great. National stability could seem a very distant problem com- pared with that of lost orders.
John Wain's poem, 'A Song about Majdr Eatherly,' quoted in Ronald Bryden's article last week, is from Weep Before God, by John Wain, published by Macmillan.
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