Red & Goldbrickers

A tiny London strike last week spotlighted a deep-seated British economic and social disease. The fight began when London's nationalized Electricity Board decided to check up on the working habits of its 700 meter readers. Its inspectors' findings: Many of the readers finish work before lunchtime, spend several hours over lunch, waste an hour or more before starting work. "Organized efforts," said the board, "have been made to restrict the amount of work done by each man." If every meter reader did a full day's work, about half of them could be released for other jobs in Britain's defense and export industries, which desperately need 500,000 extra workers.

Confronted with this indictment, the meter readers replied not with denials, but with anger. Haunted like most British workers by deep-running memories of depression-time unemployment, they had instinctively stretched out their jobs as if there were no full employment now. Explained one: "We have never overworked, for that would have been against the true principles of trade unionism, and would have meant some of us joining the dolequeue." To make matters worse, their union's president, its general secretary, and eight of the twelve board members are Communists. In protest against the inspectors ("These snoopers are a new kind of Gestapo dreamed up by the Tories," was the usual Communist response), 361 meter readers went on strike.

London was scandalized. "Quite fantastic in a country that is struggling for economic survival," said the News Chronicle. Said the Times: "Few strikers have deserved less public sympathy; few threats have called for firmer action."

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