These are the British

by Drew Middleton

One expression of the employers' approach is the tender of contracts identical to the last farthing. Britain in 1955 lost the contract for the Snowy River hydroelectric plant in Australia largely because the eight British firms among the twenty that submitted tenders all submitted exactly the same amount. In New Zealand nineteen out of twenty-six companies bidding for an electric-cable contract submitted identical figures.

The practice is embedded in British industry. Legislation to combat it was introduced into the House of Commons in 1956, but objective experts on the subject believed the legislation fell far short of the drastic action necessary.

Restrictive practices are only too evident in the larger field of relations between the worker and the boss. The importance of problems in this area of conflict is multiplied by their political implications and by the fact that Britain, like other countries, is entering a new period of industrial development. The industrial use of nuclear energy for power and the advent of automation can produce a new industrial revolution in the homeland of the first industrial revolution. But this cannot improve the British economy—indeed, the revolution cannot really get under way as a national effort—without greater co-operation between organized labor and employers and managers.

Throughout this book there have been references to organized labor and to the Trades Union Congress. Now we encounter them in the special field of industrial relations.

Organized labor in Britain is big. There are 23,000,000 people in civil employment, and of these over 9,000,000, nearly the whole of the industrial labor force, are union members. They have an enormous influence on the economic policy of any British government; they are, according to Sir Winston Churchill, "the fourth arm of the Estate"; in the view of Mr. Sam Watson, the tough, capable leader of the Durham miners, they are "the largest single organism in our society."

But organized labor is not a single force, an orderly coalition of unions. It is an extraordinary mixture. Politically some of its leaders are well to the right of the left-wing Tories although they vote Labor. One important union and a number of smaller ones are dominated by Communists. The Transport and General Workers Union has 1,300,000 members; the National Amalgamated Association of Nut and Bolt Makers has 30. Some unions are extremely democratic in composition. Others are petty dictatorships. Many are not unions in name. If you are civil-service clerk, for instance, or even a member in good standing of the Leeds and District Warp Dressers, Twisters and Kindred Trades, you join an association.

The Trades Union Congress is the most powerful voice in British labor. Only 186 of about 400 unions are affiliated with it, but as these 186 include almost all the larger ones, the TUC represents nearly 8,000,000, a majority of the country's union members.

The outsider's idea of the typical trade-unionist is a horny-handed individual in a cloth cap and a shabby "mac." But there are 1,500,000 white-collar workers, including 500,000 civil servants, among the unionists affiliated with the TUC.

The tendency of the white-collar workers to affiliate with the TUC probably will continue. In March of 1956 the London County Council Staff Association decided to apply for affiliation. We can expect that the clerical workers in this type of union will exert increasing influence within the TUC and upon its Council. The TUC's claim to represent the industrial working class thus is being watered down by the admission of the white-collar workers' unions. As this class of worker generally believes that the industrial workers' pay has risen disproportionately and that inflation has hurt the office worker more than it has the industrial worker, the new composition of the TUC may produce sharp internal differences. At any rate, the old position of the TUC as the spokesman only for the industrial worker is a thing of the past.