Labour policy—false and true

by Lynden Livingston Macassey

Part III
THE TRUE LABOUR POLICY

CHAPTER XIX
THE OUTLOOK OF THE WORKER

Ignorance about Industry—Misconceptions as to Wages—Discontent and its Causes—Effect of Bad Environment—Fear of Unemployment—Dissatisfaction with Status in Industry—Belief in Agitation—Desire for Improvement—Low Conception of Work—Suspicion of Employers—The Worker and his Trade Union—The Worker and the Community.

My endeavour, henceforward, will be to state, as concisely and clearly as the subject permits, the main principles of policy which, in my judgment, should be applied to industry and its problems. As a necessary preliminary one must indicate the characteristics of the worker, his sentiments and aspirations, his defects, his virtues. After years of continual intercourse with labour, I confess my failure to meet in the flesh the workers as depicted in current revolutionary publications; nor have I succeeded in discovering among them that alien race with sympathies and sensibilities different from those of the rest of the community, ever moved by materialistic motives, always pursuing some irrational course of foolish selfishness as described in another type of literature. Against the unwarranted accusation that the British working-man in his opinions, feelings and sentiments is at all a different person from the ordinary British citizen, I have never ceased to protest. That he often suffers from a limited outlook, reacts to prejudice, and cherishes at times a grudge against society, I am not going to deny; but after working among workers, and, later, spending a great part of the war-period in controlling one million workmen of every description, and meeting in familiar intercourse their Trade Union executives, their district committees and their own deputations in numerous shops and yards, I can truthfully say that I generally found the worker a human being who is open to reason and to acceptance of a view substantially fair and just, once his ignorance is dissipated, his prejudices removed, and his humanity recognized. He has, however, no patience for humbug, rhetoric or cant. The trouble is that he has not been treated in the past as a sentient and rational person by politicians, or even his own Trade Union leaders—the main cause of our present industrial difficulties.

Ignorance about Industry

When in retrospect I recall my impression of the outstanding characteristic of the British working-man as I knew him in the workshops, I unhesitatingly fasten on his appalling ignorance of economic matters. Few of the “rank and file” have any conception whatsoever of the factors and forces which constitute that type of economic activity known as industry, still less of the contribution of industry to our national prosperity. And in regard to commerce and its part as the handmaiden of industry, their ignorance is even more profound. There never plays upon their imagination the least glimpse of the wonderful complexity of the mechanism of finance nor of the amazingly intricate organization of buying and selling. Who can blame them—they have never been told. I have kept a meeting of workmen keenly interested for an hour, after the conclusion of some official business, in a simple explanation of the functions played by finance in industry, and of the various kinds of financial operations entailed in the marketing of the product of their particular factory. Workmen respond to sympathetic education with cheerful alacrity. One of the expedients to which the Department of Shipyard Labour resorted was the institution of talks with workmen in various ship-repairing districts of the rôles being played in the stirring circumstances of the times by naval and merchant ships which were in dry-dock in local shipyards for reconditioning or repair. It had a most stimulating effect; men found themselves no longer sluggishly working upon an uninspiring metal hulk, but upon a living ship redolent with stirring associations, engaged in performing for the nation functions and duties which they could readily understand. There was less time lost, less sleeping on night-work, fewer stoppages of work; greater expedition, larger output.

Misconceptions as to Wages

The rate of wages is a matter ever present to the mind of the worker. It is the question of most general discussion in normal times; but at all times there is a strange failure to appreciate the true facts of the position. The average workman thought, before the war, that his employer was always able to raise his rate of wages, if not to the particular level demanded, at any rate sufficiently to afford a substantial increase, and that only the employer’s selfishness stood in the way of this being done. Such most certainly was the opinion generally entertained by Labour when, during the war, the State became virtually the employer. Time after time bodies of workmen told me in perfect good faith that there was no difficulty whatever in the Government paying the rate of wages which they claimed. It seemed to them wholly immaterial that they were being paid, not out of the product of their work, but out of money borrowed by the State, with all the consequent inflation of currency and rise of prices. While, at the end of the war, many of the more enlightened Labour leaders appreciated, and a few, whom I honour, publicly denounced, the futility of the mad race of wages after prices, the average workman never was able to grasp it. There was a simple way, he thought, of compensating him for increased prices—merely to raise wages. Much of our industrial trouble to-day is due to the spurious appearance of prosperity which was caused by the high nominal wages of the war-period, and to the notion engendered in the mind of Labour that the Government could now, by resorting once more to war-time methods of controlling industry, create the same prosperity as existed immediately after the war. There is a foolish belief even among moderate men that the Government refrains from doing so in the interests of employers, in order to bring about a reduction of wages and a retrogression in conditions of employment, and to weaken the power of the Trade Unions.