Discontent, expressed in constant agitation, has unfortunately been of practical value; that is one reason why it is so rife in industry to-day. No substantial increases in wages or improvement in working conditions have, in the past, been conceded voluntarily by employers, but only after pressure by the Unions, subject, of course, to considerable qualifications in special cases. It is more or less inevitable that it should be so, having regard to the way in which the machinery of collective bargaining has been operated by both sides. Every time, when an increase of wages, or an improvement in conditions is demanded and refused, and then ultimately given under threat of a strike, it feeds the springs of future discontent and confirms in the workers’ minds the efficacy of agitation. In the latter days of the war the unsettled condition of industry was largely due to the fact that in the earlier days wage-increases had been refused and then conceded by the Government under pressure of strikes and threats of stoppages by the workers. Each time such capitulations took place it seriously ministered to the spirit of discontent.
Desire for Improvement
When one turns to other forces now commencing to pulsate through Labour, one is impressed by the increasing general desire for mental and cultural improvement, at times pathetic in its search for simple gratifications. Some persons scoff at this seeking after higher things by the working-classes; their scorn is ill-timed, and their irony misdirected. There is rapidly developing, I am glad to say, an increasing movement in this direction. Those engaged in social work in our great industrial centres can testify to the innumerable ways in which this aspiration is finding healthy expression.
More than one foreign observer has recorded his opinion that the stability of the British Constitution is materially due to the strong attachment to, and sentiment for, family life that prevail in this country. No member of the community is a stronger supporter of family life than the British working-man; no one is prepared to make more substantial sacrifices for its maintenance and preservation, no one more frequently has to make them. In this respect the British worker is one of the greatest living individualists, and the strength of his family individualism will never let him be converted into a thoroughgoing Communist. Theorists may talk to him till tired of working for the State and the community—I had to use that argument in war-time—he will answer them, as I have been answered on the Clyde: “I work for the wife and bairns.”
Low Conception of Work
In regard to his conception of work the British working-man is hopelessly wrong in his outlook. Some find pleasure in work; the manual worker is not one of them. He has come to regard work as a species of thraldom, instituted, not for his profit or improvement, but solely for the maintenance of his employer and the swelling of his profits. This, of course, is merely a weak dilution of the Marxian fallacy. The modern manual worker, because he has never been taught to look upon work as a moral duty or upon industry as one of the highest forms of national service, sees no dignity in work, and is sensible of no obligation incumbent on him to work to the best of his ability or even for the duration of the working day. The number of expedients to which I have known manual workers resort—in other respects honest, upright men—in order to scamp the job, or cut time, would be perfectly surprising to those not conversant with industry. To-day the moral obligation to work seems inverted into a duty to do as little as possible for the wages. Sometimes the motive is to make the job last longer, at other times, to assist unemployment by making work go round, and, where remuneration is based on payment by results, for less altruistic reasons, to force up the prices paid for the job. But although the Marxian doctrine—that the more work an employee does the more he contributes to the betrayal of his brother workers by assisting the employer to amass illicit gains out of their exploitation—explains much of the work-shyness and “ca-canny” of to-day, there are other reasons. One is the extent to which work is subdivided in modern factory organization. In an engineering shop, a job done thirty or forty years ago by a skilled man on a general purpose machine is now subdivided into a large number of constituent operations. These will be performed by different workers on different semi-automatic machines, and the finished part will be assembled by another set of workers into the final product. In the old days the tradesman saw the finished article gradually taking shape under his creative craftsmanship; to-day no worker sees anything but the single operation which he performs. As a result, there is little to minister to the instincts of a craftsman. The workman employed on such repetition work becomes quickly apathetic, his interest relaxes, his inventiveness atrophies, his initiative dies, he degenerates into a cog, and, being human, into an inefficient cog, in the vast mechanism of industry. These methods of mass production are quite inevitable in modern efficient practice, and the only antidote is to encourage the workers to acquire a wider interest in industry, and in the prosperity of the works in which they are employed, and to cultivate a spirit of culture so that their minds may be filled with other things which satisfy their human aspirations, and replace the noble satisfaction which a tradesman used to feel as the creation of his handicraft grew beneath his skill.
Suspicion of Employers
If asked what was the strongest sentiment I found permeating the workshops, I should answer, suspicion of employers. In some districts it is worse than in others; in some works it is worse than in other works in the same district. Many reasons have been advanced for its existence, but the real explanation is simple. Between the fifties and the eighties of last century, when the machinery of collective bargaining was coming into operation, the principle of action adopted by many employers was “enlightened self-interest”—the individualistic theory that an employer best served his own interests, and, automatically by so doing the best interests of the country, by furthering on all occasions his own advantage. To call this greed or selfishness is wrong. It implied no callous disregard of the rights of the workers, but it did involve such a bias of mind that the interests of employees were subordinated in the scheme of industry to those of the employers. In the course of collective bargaining, of manœuvring for position, of higgling, many managements contracted the habit of seizing upon any circumstances which might enable them to cut piece-rates and time-allowances, bring down wages, revise conditions of employment, and adopted the invariable attitude of resisting all the demands of their employees. Such employers have disappeared, but “the evil that men do lives after them.” Not unnaturally, the workers learned to decipher some hostile motive behind each action of their employer, however apparently beneficent, and regarded everything he did with unalloyed suspicion, and as calling for the closest scrutiny. This is the cause of the want of confidence in the industrial atmosphere to-day. While it continues so charged with mistrust, confidence between all persons concerned in industry, which is necessary for production and essential for smooth running of the industrial machine, can never flourish. All employers unreservedly now deprecate this unhappy condition of things, many have gone to exceptional trouble to dissipate the blight on industry of such distrust, but memories are long, industrial prejudices tenacious, and it will take time and much effort to forge a bond of trust.
The Worker and his Trade Union
The attitude of the British worker to his Trade Union reflects the British temperament. Abroad one sees the workers follow their Unions in matters both industrial and political; in this country there is no such general surrender of individual judgment. So far as industrial questions are concerned, with the exception of some smaller Unions whose members seem always in a seething condition of revolt, and certain revolutionary elements in some of the great Unions, the majority of Trade Unionists will follow their own Union leaders. That, however, is a very different thing from following the general lead of the combined Trade Unions as expressed through the Trades Union Congress or the Labour Party. As one result of the craft organization of industry in this country, which at times during the war showed signs of disintegration but now seems more firmly established than ever, the Unions are almost as suspicious of one another’s motives—a result of the fear of one trade invading the other’s work—as Labour in the mass is suspicious of the employers. Where, however, a question is, rightly or wrongly, represented to involve a principle directly affecting the common interests of all workers, the Trade Unionist has been so well drilled in the virtue of solidarity that he will, generally, range himself under the banner of organized Labour. In regard to political matters there is no such docility, although compelled to contribute to his Union’s political fund. To-day he is forced to do so, in spite of his power to object under the Trade Union Act 1913; if the Trade Union Act (1913) Amendment Bill 1922 passes, he will not be liable unless he expressly agrees. There is evidence of independence in the results of the General Election in 1918 and of by-elections since, where very large sections of the workers have voted, not for the official Labour candidate, but for the candidate of another political party opposing Labour. This fact undoubtedly explains the strenuous efforts of the Labour Party to formulate a composite political programme which will appear to its Trade Unionist members as an industrial programme, and to non-industrial supporters as one primarily of a social character.