Naturally the disappearance of differentials has led to hot disputes among workers and unions. In this atmosphere it is difficult for either the union leaders or the employers to urge increased productivity and harder work. "Everyone is furious with everyone else," an industrialist in the Midlands said. "They start with me, but they are pretty mad at each other, too."
In this interminable war between labor and management, the former wields a weapon of enormous potency—the strike. Labor acknowledges its disadvantages, but the right to strike is fiercely guarded. The whispered suggestion that strikes might be made illegal unites the labor movement as does nothing else. Labor needs the strike as its ultimate weapon: the hydrogen bomb of British industrial relations. And because of the peculiar economic conditions in Britain, the employer finds himself almost weaponless. He can still dismiss an unsatisfactory employee, if he has a good reason and can convince the employee's union that it is a good reason. But dismissal does not mean much in an era of full employment.
Right-wing critics on both sides of the Atlantic have contended for a decade that British economic difficulties are rooted in strikes and other industrial disturbances. There is something in this, but, as H.L. Mencken would have said, not much.
From 1946 through 1954 the days lost through strikes in Britain ranged from a low of 1,389,000 in 1950 to a high of 2,457,000 in 1954. Due to strikes in the newspaper and railroad industries and on the docks, 1955 was an exceptionally bad year: 3,794,000 working days were lost. The figures look big, and of course it would have been much better for Britain if they were half as large. But let's put them into perspective. The figure for 1955, admittedly high, represents a loss of less than one day's work per man in every five years' employment. The loss to production through industrial accidents is eight times as high.
Both sides know that a strike is a costly business: costly to labor, to management, to the union, to the nation. In many cases the threat of a strike has been enough to force the employers to give way. Inevitably, the higher cost of production resulting from the new wage rates is passed on to the consumer. The merry-go-round of rising prices, rising wages, and rising costs spins dizzily onward. Overseas the buyer who is choosing between a Jaguar or a Mercedes finds that the price of the former has suddenly risen, so he buys the German car rather than the British one. This is what the economists mean when they warn British labor and industry about pricing themselves out of the export market.
As we have seen, the industrial worker is doing pretty well in Britain, even if the rise in prices is taken into consideration. The average weekly earnings for all male adult workers, according to the records kept by the Ministry of Labor, show a rise from £3 9s. 0d. in 1938 to £10 17s. 5d. in 1955—an increase of 215 per cent. The coal-miners who were earning £3 2s. 10d. in 1938 are now earning a weekly wage of £13 18s. 6d. The figure does not represent wealth by American standards, for it amounts to approximately $38.99. But it is high pay by British standards, and when the low cost of subsidized housing and the comparatively low cost of food are taken into account it will be seen that the British miner is living very well.
The miner's view is that he does a dirty, dangerous job, that he has never been well paid before, and that if a union does not exist to win pay rises for its members, what good is it? The miners and the union members in the engineering industry belong to strong unions able to win wage increases by threats of a strike. Once these increases are granted, other smaller unions clamor for their share of wage rises. The merry-go-round takes another turn.
Government attempts to urge restraint, through the TUC, upon the unions customarily fall afoul of the snag that each union believes that it is a special case and that although other unions can postpone their demands for higher wages until next year, it cannot. So one union makes a move and the whole business begins again. If the increase is not granted, there is a strike or a threat of a strike. The national economy suffers, class antagonism increases, and export production is delayed. For such is the interdependence of the British industrial machine and so great is the drive for exports that any industrial dispute that reaches the strike stage inevitably affects exports.
A modern strike is like a modern war. No one wins and everyone loses. A classic case is the Rolls-Royce strike of 1955, which involved not only employers and union labor but, eventually, the Roman Catholic Church and the Communist Party. The cause of the strike was a conflict between restrictive practices and a stubborn workman named Joseph McLernon, who worked at the Rolls-Royce factory at Blantyre in Scotland as a polisher of connecting rods.
The workers in Joe's shop feared that, in view of reduced work, some of their number might be let out. So they agreed to share their work by limiting bonus earnings to 127 per cent of the basic rate. McLernon, however, refused to limit his overtime. He polished as long and as hard as ever and refused the assistance of another worker. For this, McLernon was reprimanded by his union, the General Iron Fitter's Association.