The attitude of the industrial working class to wage increases is a factor in the drive to boost the exports on which the nation lives. The modernization of British industry to meet the requirements of the nation's economic position, alterations in management and sales practices, higher production and productivity will not suffice to win export markets if the wage level in industry continues to rise. A steady rise will price Britain out of her markets. Should this occur, the question of whether organized labor is to take kindly to automation will become academic. The country cannot live without those markets.
Early in September of 1956 when the world was worrying over the Suez Canal, The New York Times carried a news item from Brighton, the English seashore resort, that surely was as important to Britain as anything Premier Nasser or Sir Anthony Eden or Mr. Dulles might say.
The Trades Union Congress, the dispatch said, had rejected the Conservative government's plea for restraint in pressing wage claims. The final paragraphs of a resolution passed unanimously at the eighty-eighth annual conference said that the TUC " ... asserts the right of labor to bargain on equal terms with capital, and to use its bargaining strength to protect the workers from the dislocations of an unplanned economy.
"It rejects proposals to recover control by wage restraint, and by using the nationalized industries as a drag-anchor for the drifting national economy."
These phrases reveal the heart of the quarrel between the TUC and the government. The Conservatives are belabored for not carrying out a Socialist policy—i.e., a planned economy—but restraint on wages is rejected.
The resolution represented a serious check in progress toward a national understanding of the country's economic position. It ensured, I believe, another round of wage demands by the unions, protracted industrial disputes, and, eventually, higher costs for industry and higher prices for foreign buyers.
The constant bickering between union and union, between unions and employers, and between the TUC and the government should not divert us from the qualities of the British industrial working class. It is highly skilled, especially in the fields of electronics and the other new industries now so important to the export trade. Its gross production and productivity are rising. It is, once aroused, intelligent and energetic. The nation is essentially homogeneous. There is obviously a wide gap between worker and employer in Britain, but it seems less wide when we compare it with the French worker's hostility toward his boss.
But of course the industrial worker is only one unit of the industrial system. Working with him are hundreds of thousands of engineers, technicians, planners, and managers—men of high quality, imaginative, daring, and resourceful. Together these two groups operate industries that are rapidly recovering from the effects of the war and the frantic post-war period in which all machines had to run at top speed, regardless of repairs, if Britain was to make enough to live.
If Americans understand that in a smaller country industry will be on a smaller scale than in the United States, they must concede that the steel plants in Wales and the North, the hydroelectric power system built in the fastnesses of the Scottish Highlands, the new nuclear-energy power stations now nearing completion are impressive industrial installations. British industry in the physical sense is not a collection of obsolete or obsolescent factories and rundown mills; new plants and factories are appearing with greater frequency every year, and the emphasis is on the future.
A journey through the busy Midlands provides the proof. Everywhere one sees new construction for industrial production. The rawboned red brick factories, relics of Victorian England, are silent and empty; many have been pulled down. The main problem for Britain is not the modernity of her industrial system but the lack of modernity in the outlook of her industrial workers.