CHAPTER XII
The Bradford Committee Report
The Bradford Committee ignores its reference. It recommends measures that would cost $6,500,000 a year, in the hope of satisfying the postal employees, who had asked for $12,500,000 a year. Lord Stanley, Postmaster General, rejects the Bradford Committee’s Report; but grants increases in wages and salaries aggregating $1,861,500 a year.
In the preceding chapter it was stated that the Government in August, 1903, appointed Sir Edward Bradford, Mr. Charles Booth, Mr. Thomas Brodrick, Mr. R. Burbidge, and Mr. Samuel Fay a Committee “to inquire into the scales of pay received by the undermentioned classes of Established Post Office Servants, and to report whether, having regard to the conditions of their employment and to the rates current in other occupations, the remuneration of (a) Postmen, (b) Sorters (London), (c) Telegraphists (London), (d) Sorting Clerks and Telegraphists (Provincial) is adequate.” No further question was submitted to the Committee.
The Committee, in May, 1904, reported: “We have not seen our way to obtain any specific evidence as to the comparative rates of wages current in other occupations. So far as regards this portion of the reference to us,[209] we came to the conclusion that no really useful purpose would be served by asking employers of labor to furnish precise details of the wages paid by them. Certain official information is already available, being obtained and published from time to time by the Board of Trade. This information, supplemented by our own experience, affords more reliable data than any particulars we could hope to obtain in the way of evidence within the limits of an inquiry of reasonable duration.
Business Methods not applicable in State Service
“Moreover, it is difficult to make any valid comparison between a National Postal Service and any form of private industrial employment, the entire conditions being necessarily so different; payment by results and promotion or dismissal according to the will of the employer being inapplicable if not impossible under the State.”[210]
The Committee’s report covers nineteen pages, but only these two paragraphs are in answer to the reference given to the Committee. In them the Committee reports its failure; and with that report of failure the Committee should have contented itself, under all of the rules of procedure governing Committees and Commissions appointed by the British Government. But the Committee ignored the established rules of procedure, roamed about at will, and reopened many of the questions settled by the Tweedmouth Committee, which had sat two years, and had taken upward of a thousand closely printed folio pages of evidence. The Bradford Committee did this in violation of the established usage of the country, as well as in spite of the fact that Mr. Austen Chamberlain, Postmaster General, had closed the speech in which he announced his resolve to appoint the Committee, with the words that he wanted advice on the question of comparative wages only and that he refused to transfer to “any Committee the duty of regulating in all its details the daily administration and work of the Post Office.”
Upon the Report of the Committee, The Economist[211] (London) commented as follows: “This Committee was asked to compare the wages of Post Office servants with those paid for corresponding work outside. Their answer was, in effect, that no such comparison could be instituted. Why, when postal servants are taken from various ascertained classes [of society], it should be impossible to compare their pay with that ordinarily received by the same classes in other employments is not obvious. What is obvious is that the Committee either mistook the inquiry entrusted to them, or did not choose to enter upon it.”