The retreat from work
The past week has been an interesting one for students of the British Disease. A worker who had slept during the night shift not inadvertently, through exhaustion, but deliberately, removing appropriate garments -was sacked. He took his case to an industrial relations tribunal which awarded £903 compensation for wrongful dismissal. That was in Luton. Meanwhile at the naval base of Faslane on the Clyde the dock workers are on strike. Their strike has threatened the sailing of HMS Revenge, the nuclear subMarine which is part of this country's modest contribution th NATO. The workers are striking for more money, although promising to relent in a case of a 'genuine eMergency': something which they -or their shop stewards think themselves qualified to identify. Meanwhile, back at the House of Commons the Government presses on with the Dock Labour Scheme. The (thlect of this is not, of course, to make work in the docks atY more efficient, but to extend the authority of unionised nockers even further outside docks than had been done by the Dockwork Regulations Act of 1976. The flagrancy of tilt Piece of legislation is so gross that even Mr James Prior !night repeal it. It is so extraordinary in its blatant favouritIstri of the Transport and General Workers Union that even Tthe leaders of other unions do not much care for it. The ransport and General is the biggest union, therefore the Most financially valuable to the Labour Party, therefore the Most esteemed by Labour governments. The only limit on the. extension of their rights and powers by this aston nrq y unprincipled government is thus the anxieties of Tler unions. To cap all this we may soon be unable to read auout further industrial follies. Fleet Street's own labour 13113blems are now so acute that there is a serious prospect a.total shut-down of national newspapers. Life, Wilde said, is a tragedy for those who feel and a Comedy for those who think. The follies of British industrial relations, of union powers and working-class intransigence, are indeed richly comic. But in one sense we all feel, and ,Most find them tragic: 'industrial relations' are slowly doing t°r us all. Everyone knows that this country has become steadily poorer in the last thirty years. Almost everyone now recognises that the fault lies with low productivity, and most people will assign the greatest blame to the restrictive practices which the unions have been allowed to inflict on industry. On the ever-less-trendy left other explanations are offered. The British economy has been in poor shape, and in a sense in decline, for nearly a century, it is said, with some truth; and management itself is as much to blame as labour. This last cannot seriously be maintained. British management may be incompetent and torpid. But the psychological truth is clear enough, No entrepreneur, however dull-witted or 'under-motivated', wants to lose money. It is always in his interest to maximise profit, and while skill and initiative may be beyond him anyone can spot a spanner in the works and remove it if he is allowed to. Even British Leyland managers, for whom, quite probably, there is not much to be said, do not choose to use ten times as many workers to produce a car in a given time as Nissan does in Japan.
The inescapable conclusion is that, as the late Ernest Bevin succinctly put it, 'the buggers won't work'. There really does seem to be a profound disinclination on the part of the British working class to work. Of course most people resent working at tedious jobs, which is why there have always been sticks and carrots to induce people to work. The stick has gone, thankfully: there is no longer the lash of poverty to drive people to work. But the carrot doesn't seem to have appeared. In other advanced industrialised countries workers have grasped that if they allow the most efficient form of production, and other Inegalitarian' incentives, and don't insist on job preservation' in the sense of over-manning, they will thereby be materially enriched. That is a lesson the British seem incapable of learning.
When Mrs Thatcher comes to power she can apply herself with circumspection to this problem. If the old-fashioned stick can no longer be wielded the Conservatives can at least wave their fists by removing the absurd financial cushioning of strikes for example. And the carrot must be salted with reduction in income tax. Restoring order from industrial anarchy is not going to be easy but a Conservative government will be neglecting its elementary responsibilities if it does not even try.
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