Never Have So Many Done So Little for So Much

Britain is fighting another battle these days, a struggle to pay its way in the competitive world economy. The country is getting scant help from the British workingman, who too often thinks that the only fight he has to wage is the battle against his boss. Padded payrolls and plain sloth are slowing production at home, losing business abroad and aggravating the chronic trade deficit and the sterling crisis. Examples:

> In Liverpool, dock-wallopers practice a custom called "welting"; half of an eight-man crew works while the other half loafs, and at intervals they change roles. Welting was adopted in World War II for quite another purpose--to enable dockers to survive backbreaking twelve-hour days. It is recognized as such a good thing that it is practiced in other British industries.

> On London's docks, a forklift and three men can accomplish as much work as a 14-man gang once did; dockworkers have accepted forklifts, but still insist that the 14-man gang follow each truck around.

> In a recent competition for a contract to build four harbor tugs, British firms lost out because they estimated that 110,000 man-hours would be needed to build them; the winning U.S. bid specified 39,000 man-hours.

> Two British builders also lost $1,000,000 in orders for ship navigational gear because their bids were three times and five times higher than competing U.S. bids. Reason: labor costs.

> In Britain, a seven-unit rotary press requires 19 operators; an identical press in Sweden is handled by five men at a 75% wage saving.

While British wages went up 9% last year, productivity has increased only 1 %. That was far short of the government's goal of 3.8% or the U.S.'s increase of 2.8% in 1965. Three British steelworkers are needed to produce the steel that one U.S. worker turns out. The British auto industry, 15% overstaffed, turns out 5.2 cars per worker a year compared with 5.6 per worker in Germany and eleven per worker in the U.S. Oxford University's Allan Flanders, an industrial-relations expert, estimates that industry is 40% overstaffed. Sir Maurice Laing, president of the Confederation of British Industry, warns that the country appears to be "hellbent on industrial suicide."

Dangerous Wildcats. Britain's government leaders have often mismanaged the economy, and its executives have often been unimaginative, but Britons themselves are increasingly blaming their productivity plight on the backward-looking trade unions, which count 9,900,000 members. Mired in a Depression-era mentality and still committed to the concept of class struggle, many unionists have an inexplicable fear that the grim layoffs of the 1930s will reoccur. They are not likely to. In Scotland alone, there are now 154 jobs available for every 100 men looking for work, and unemployment throughout Britain is at a ten-year low of 1.3% .

The unions are fragmented groups in which militant shop stewards seem to have more power than high chiefs, frequently call wildcat strikes if management dares to suggest a change in the work rules or runs an efficiency study. Strikes in 1965, the first full year of Labor Party rule, cost 2,900,000 working days, up 25% from the previous year. The respected head of the Trades Union Congress, bushy-browed George Woodcock, 61, who looks remarkably like U.S. Unionist John L. Lewis, had so little influence on the country's striking seamen (see THE WORLD) that he flew off to a scheduled Majorca vacation in the midst of the worst work stoppage in a decade.

Unionized Cabinet. With Woodcock and his colleagues unable to make basic changes in the workingman's mentality, Prime Minister Wilson--who has no fewer than ten former high union officers in his Cabinet--may have to take some kind of tough action. So far, how ever, he has done little more than plead and warn. To a labor rally in Liverpool, Wilson said: "The defensive work-spreading practices bred in the years of the Depression, far from defending full employment and wage standards, are the surest way to endanger them. We cannot get higher production by drawing on unused resources, unused factory space, unused labor, because in conditions of full employment they are not there. So it means raising production with the resources that are there, and that means productivity."

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