Piecework and Sabotage
By one device or another the Communist element in the trade unions manages to make trouble—and to make it so that the main bouts correspond with each new attempt to improve the national defences. This time the engineering unions are the dupes, and the particular device by which they are being exploited is a deliberate perversion of the national agreement on wages recently reached after long negotiation between the Engineering Employers' Federa- tion and the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions. In certain cases groups of employees consider themselves unfairly treated under this agreement because their piecework rates have not been raised—this despite the fact that the central object of the agreement was to improve the condition only of the lower-paid workers. They have therefore hit upon a device for bringing pressure to bear on their employers, regardless of the facts that the agreement was voluntarily negotiated, that new and crucial rearma- ment demands for full output from the engineering industry have now to be made, and that the workers have to lose money in order to pursue the dispute. The device is simply to refuse to accept piecework, to insist on working at the lower day-rates under which
pay is not determined by results, and then deliberately to restrict output. On Merseyside, Tyneside and elsewhere this exercise in perverted ingenuity is spreading like a plague. It bears all the marks of Communist inspiration—even down to the cynical decision that the men must cut off their nose to spite their face. And whether it takes the form of reduced output now or a further inflationary wage rise later its inevitable effect will be to hamper rearmament. Presumably the unions will one day rid themselves of this evil in their own midst, but they are taking a very•long time to do it.
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