Showdown with Labor

As squads of police watched silently from a distance, hundreds of angry British dockworkers and sympathizers from other unions converged on London's hulking Pentonville Prison. The demonstrators paraded their banners like so many regimental flags. FREE THE FIVE, SPREAD THE STRIKE, commanded one. Others called for SOLIDARITY WITH THE DOCKERS! or simply jeered, HITLER 1933, HEATH 1972.

The demonstrators' heroes--five dock workers who had been briefly jailed for illegal picketing practices --were the focus of what suddenly exploded last week into the most sullen and emotional confrontations between British labor and British government since Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath came to power two years ago. By midweek, when the Pentonville Five were released on a convenient legal technicality, upwards of 170,000 British workers had left their jobs in sympathy strikes that slowed or shut down mines and steel mills, virtually closed London's Heathrow airport, stopped most of London's busses and for five full days halted Fleet Street's presses. At week's end angry dockers, shouting "We want work! We want work!," voted for an indefinite strike that promised to cripple Britain's ports, its already fragile economy and very possibly Ted Heath's political future.

Though the issues were complex, the fundamental question was clear: would Heath's Tory government ever be able to make good on its pledges to end the ceaseless labor strife that has sapped Britain's industrial competitiveness and clouded its economic and social future? Sadly, that goal has rarely seemed more remote. In the first six months of this year alone, wildcat strikes and sporadic walkouts cost Britain precisely 15,460,000 "lost" working days--more than for all of 1971 and indeed for any year since 1926, the year of the great General Strike.

Heath's hopes--and British labor's ire--focus on the sweeping Industrial Relations Act, which Heath's Tory majority pushed through Parliament last August. The act is the first serious attempt in 66 years to reform British union-management relations; among other things, it established a special Industrial Relations Court empowered to rule on labor disputes. But rightly or wrongly, many British workingmen regard the new court as a basically anti-labor "political court."

None are more convinced of that than Britain's 42,000 dock workers, who have won a deserved reputation for toughness and truculence. In 1970 they greeted Heath's upset election with demands for an 80% basic wage increase --and shut the ports down for three costly weeks when the Tories refused to ante up. This time the dockers, hard pressed by the introduction of containerized cargo and other improvements, were fighting for jobs.

Last week's showdown grew out of a seemingly minor dispute: the picketing of an East London cold-storage firm by a group of determined dockers. Their demand was that the task of packing shipping containers at the firm should be turned over to registered dock workers. The trouble began when the dockers, defying a "truce" ordered by the new labor court, began to boycott trucks supplying the firm. When the court decided to flex its muscles and send five of the offending dockers to Pentonville, labor decided to flex too.

As sympathy strikes spread rapidly, the dockers warmed to their unaccustomed role as labor heroes. "I cannot understand why I was not taken along to prison with the others," complained Eddie Hedges, a picketer who was arrested but later released by the court. "I've done just as much as them in the picket line." By midweek, passions were cooled, at least temporarily, when the Five were released on the recommendation of the official solicitor, an obscure but supposedly independent official who acts as a kind of legal ombudsman for impecunious Britons.

But there was no pacifying the angry dockers. Amid rank-and-file union members dancing and cheering "We've won! We've won!," union delegates met in London's Transport House to vote to shut down Britain's 40 ports indefinitely. The dockers also rejected recommendations for government job guarantees and substantial increases in retirement pay. It was an indication of the deep, visceral uneasiness of Britain's dockers. Though they are among the country's best-paid workers, they are being mercilessly squeezed by progress: modernization has wiped out 18,000 jobs on the docks in the past few years.

In Commons, Heath firmly stood by the Industrial Relations Act. Some Laborites tried to canonize the Pentonville Five by comparing them to the Tolpuddle Martyrs--six laborers who were sent to a penal colony in 1834 for organizing a trade union. Labor Party Chief Harold Wilson, who led the attack on Heath in Commons, scourged Tory labor policy as "inept and malevolent." He ignored the fact that as Prime Minister in 1969 he had not only pressed unsuccessfully for similar reforms but also called them "essential."

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