Cotton Crisis

"If I were in office now," said ex-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin last week with Cheshire-cat complacence, "everyone would be blaming me for this cotton strike!"

Half a million sturdy Lancashire cotton folk had ceased to spin and weave. Their grievance was specific, precisely stated. The mill owners had announced a 12 1/2% wage cut. That would pare the average wage of each male Lancashire breadwinner from a pitiful 47 shillings ($11.08) weekly to a scandalous 41 shillings ($9.84). Sisters, wives and mothers, long since driven by necessity to eke out the family income by working in the mills, would get not 30 shillings ($7.20) but 27 shillings ($6.48), for a week's skilled labor with trained and nimble fingers.

Humble, hard-toiling, peasant-bred Lancashire has stood for other wage cuts, but this was to the bone. With quiet, orderly determination--with a self-control more intimidating to employers than any show of violence--500,000 steady and skilled workers stopped work on the day the wage cut became effective last week. They are craftsfolk. Out of the question to replace them with scab labor not skilled to spin and weave! The cotton strike, colossal in magnitude, damaging to a dozen allied British trades, world-wide in repercussions, was, at its focus in Lancashire, almost terrifyingly simple: a stark, stubborn battle of wills between a Labor Monopoly and a Capital Monopoly.

"Cotton Weather." Why is British cotton fabricating confined almost exclusively to Lancashire, thus creating even a regional monopoly, putting all Britannia's cotton eggs dangerously in one basket?

The answer is that in early cotton spinning days, a peculiarly damp climate with chronic "bad weather" was necessary to make the cotton fibres cling properly together as they were spun into thread. All England is damp, but the atrocious weather typical of Lancashire, is positively ideal--for cotton spinning. Nurtured on this gift of Providence the mills of Lancashire have grown until they now number close to 2,000--for the most part, small, ugly mills employing a few hundred craftsfolk in each.

Today, of course, it is possible to make artificial "cotton spinning weather" anywhere. The thing is done in Germany with conspicuous success. But in Great Britain the early concentration of the cotton industry in Lancashire has only been intensified with time. The evils of stagnation and "oldfashioned methods" are chronic in the region, seem as immutable and familiar to Englishmen as the names of the world famed cotton towns:

Manchester, Bolton, Rochdale, Bury, Blackburn, Oldham, Nelson, Glossop.

Laborite Laissez Faire. Efforts to end the strike were not strenuously made, last week, by Britain's new Labor Government. Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald seemed to think he needed a few days vacation, took it at his rustic Scottish home in Lossiemouth. Even kinetic Margaret ("Maggie") Bondfield, onetime shop clerk and now Minister of Labor, adopted a surprising attitude of laissez faire. True, a subcommittee of a subcommittee of a Cabinet subcommittee was established, "to consider and report upon" the situation, but even its chairman. Laborite Rt. Hon. William Graham. President of the Board of Trade, took only perfunctory steps. Inference : Laborite best minds thought, last week, that the Lancashire strikers, if let alone, would win a not too long drawn out victory.

"Golden Harvest?" Alarmist reports from the Empire's trade frontiers undoubtedly tended to weaken the employers front in Lancashire. The potent Rothermere press envisioned Germany and Japan as "likely to acquire, perhaps permanently" a huge volume of business sure to be lost by Britain in the event of a long strike. "The textile mills of Northern France are working at top speed." warned Viscount Rothermere's Daily Mail, "and they will reap a golden harvest of orders that ordinarily would go to Lancashire. . . Even Poland is reckoning on big profits."

Inevitably these warnings impinged more forcibly on Capital than on Labor. The striking spinners and weavers were not watching economic trends last week. Mostly they acted as though the strike were a holiday. Thousands swarmed merrily down to seaside resorts, splashed, dived, basked. It was in the stuffy offices of Lancashire mills that grave-faced executives sweated over the risk of crippling sales losses abroad.

Mayors Mediate. Despairing of Government mediation the Mayor of Blackburn induced nine other Lancashire mayors to unite under his chairmanship as a Committee of Conciliation. In a few hours they had established relations with Secretary Thomas Ashurst of the Cotton Spinners and Manufacturers' Association, with Secretary George Pogson of the Federation of Master Cotton Spinners. Here at last was a channel through which both sides could dicker without losing face.

Repercussions. Leading U. S. cotton experts were in substantial agreement that: 1) Even a brief Lancashire strike would depress the market for raw cotton as British orders were curtailed. 2) Only a long Lancashire strike would boom the U. S. cotton textile trade. Reason: the British mills have reserve stocks of the type of high class cotton cloth competitively manufactured in the U. S. and can maintain their position in this class of goods for some weeks or months. 3) Germany and Japan, producers of cheapest cotton cloth, will be in a much stronger position to grab what Lancashire loses of this business--and the bulk of Lancashire cloth has long been of the cheaper grades.