A Sort of Settlement

In Liverpool last week a venerable labor leader sentimentally told his colleagues: "After 30 years in the union it was the greatest pleasure of my life to see the Dock Road in such an idle state yesterday." At Southampton other union bosses sallied out in a motor launch to hurl the dreaded epithet "strikebreaker" at the crews of Royal Navy tugs which were towing the 81,237-ton Queen Mary out to sea. Without quite knowing how or why, Britain had drifted to the verge of a work stoppage which all the headlines said would be the biggest since the general strike of 1926.

Five months ago, union leaders in three major industries, one after another, demanded a 10% wage increase for their men. Fortnight ago, to back up their demand. 210,000 shipyard workers walked out of Britain's 70 yards, which have enough orders on the books to keep booming through 1961. Six days later, the 2,750,000 members of Britain's "engineering" unions began a "snowball strike," or progressive walkout, which by April 6 was scheduled to close down 4,300 factories producing everything from textile looms to bombers. In the background, muttering ominously, were the 370,000 generally low-paid employees of the nationalized railways.

Cash First. Unchecked, the spreading strikes would be one more deadly blow to Britain's determination to keep its place in the world. (Nearly half of the exports on which Britain lives are made by members of the engineering unions.) Both shipyard and engineering employers adamantly refused to offer any wage increase at all. British wages, they declared, had risen twice as much as the cost of living in 1956, were now so high that they threatened to price British exports out of world markets. Just as intransigent, the unions flatly refused to submit their case to arbitration. Said Ted Hill, the beefy general secretary of the Boilermakers: "It's hard cash or nothing . . . Our members come before the country."

First to weaken in the face of this stalemate was the government. Late last week, despite all of Harold Macmillan's sermons against a new round of wage increases, the government-owned national railways bought off the threatening railway workers with a 5% increase, though the cost of living has gone up only 3% since their 7% wage increase last year. A few minutes later came the announcement that able, fast-rising Minister of Labor Iain Macleod, 43, had persuaded the shipyard employers and union leaders to agree to face-to-face negotiation of their differences.

No Return. At week's end prospects were good that both the shipyard and engineering strikes would soon be ended. (Since both groups belong to the same confederation, the engineers would probably follow the shipbuilders' lead.) There was, however, little likelihood that any of the strikers would now be content with anything less than the 5% increase granted the railwaymen, or that they in return would have to abandon the restrictive practices (featherbedding, rigid jurisdictional rules, etc.) which keep their productivity from going up as fast as their pay. Warned the London Economist: "The threat to the national economy . . . does not arise solely from the possibility of widespread industrial stoppages. It arises, too, from the possibility of inflationary settlements of these disputes."

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