These are the British

by Drew Middleton

The TUC is a powerful voice. But it is only a voice. It has great responsibilities and little formal power. It can, for instance, attempt to moderate demands for higher wages and urge restraint, but it cannot prevent any union from pressing such demands. The TUC can advise and conciliate when a strike begins, but it cannot arbitrarily halt one. When two member unions are in a dispute—and such disputes can seriously damage both the national economy and labor's position in British society—the TUC can intervene, but too often its intervention is futile. Each union is self-governing. The TUC's influence, nonetheless, is enormous. The restraint shown by the major unions after the war and during the war on the question of wage increases was largely due to the influence of the TUC. The general growth of responsibility on the part of many unions can also be attributed, to a great extent, to the missionary work of the TUC.

In recent years the General Council of the TUC has moved toward assuming a stronger position in the field of industrial strikes. It has tried to show the workers that the strike is a two-edged sword that wounds both worker and employer. The TUC maintains that the strike, the workers' great weapon, should not be used indiscriminately because of the damage a strike by one union can do to other unions and to the national economy.

At the 1955 TUC conference the General Council won acceptance of a proposal that it intervene in any case of a threatened strike when negotiations between the employers and the unions seem likely to break down, throwing the members of other unions out of work or endangering their wages, hours, and conditions. This is a significant step forward. Formerly the TUC could move only after negotiations had broken down and a deadlock had been reached. In other words, the TUC acted only at the moment when both sides were firmly entrenched.

But this advance does not improve organized labor's position in regard to the problem of restrictive practices, a problem that is as serious as strikes or threats of strikes.

The Daily Mirror of London, that brash, vigorous tabloid which is the favorite newspaper of the industrial working class, published an inquiry into the trade unions in 1956. Its authors, Sydney Jacobson and William Connor, who conducts the column signed "Cassandra," traced the origin of restrictive practices back to 1811, when bands of workers known as the Luddites broke into lace and stocking factories and smashed the machinery. "The suspicion toward new methods has never entirely died out in this country," they wrote, "and although sabotage of machinery is rare (but not unknown) the protests have taken a new direction—the slowing down of output by the men themselves and the development of a whole series of practices that cut down the production of goods and services."

Any reader of the British press can recall dozens of instances of restrictive practices by labor. One famous one concerned the floating grain elevator at Hull, an east-coast seaport. This elevator, which cost £200,000 ($560,000), was kept idle for two months because the Transport and General Workers Union insisted that it should be worked by twice as many men as the Transport Commission thought necessary. The Transport Commission, incidentally, represented a nationalized industry.

And there was the union that fined a milkman £2 for delivering milk before 7:30 a.m.

The unions are quick and brutal in their punishment of those who break their rules. Indeed, today, when there is full employment and the unions generally enjoy a prosperity and power undreamed of by their founders, they are more malicious than in the old days when they were fighting for their rights. The principal weapon against an offending worker is to "send him to Coventry." No one speaks to him; he eats and walks home alone. Ronald Hewitt, a crane-driver, endured this for a year. He had remained at work, obeying his union's rules, when his fellow workers, who belonged to another union, went out on strike. Hewitt was a person of unusual mental toughness. Another worker sent to Coventry committed suicide.

Many of these punishments are the outcome of situations in which unofficial strikes send out the workers. Those who remain and who are punished are accused of being "scabs" because they obey the union's rules.