Not All Right Now, Jack

WAVING a scrap of paper over his head, British Home Secretary Robert Carr rose to speak in the House of Commons. "Message from the Queen, signed by her Majesty's own hand!" he shouted. The paper, which Carr had brought by boat and plane from the royal yacht Britannia, on which Queen Elizabeth II had been cruising off the west coast of Scotland, was a declaration of a national state of emergency. It was the fourth such declaration that Britain's Tory government has had to seek since coming to power two years ago. The cause this time: a nationwide strike by 42,000 dock workers, who were again proving that the nation that once ruled the waves is lucky nowadays if it can use its own ports.

The strike, called by Britain's truculent dockers to dramatize their frets about job security and Tory efforts to reform British labor practices (TIME, Aug. 7), affected some 600 ships that were either in or on their way to Britain's 40 major ports. Exports worth millions of dollars a day to the country's fragile economy piled up on idle piers, while thousands of tons of Guernsey tomatoes, grapes from Cyprus and Australian apples rotted in the ships' holds or were destroyed. British housewives, who vividly remember the three-week dock strike of 1970, stocked up on meat, fresh fruits and vegetables. Cattle feed-lot operators worried that Britain had only a two-week supply of animal feed. Angry dock leaders predicted an "indefinite" strike, and it seemed possible that Prime Minister Edward Heath would have to call out troops to deal with what the Queen's order said was a threat to "deprive the community of the essentials of life." Subject to Parliament's approval this week, the declaration of a state of emergency will allow the government to requisition transport, control food prices and use troops to replace striking workers any time during the next 28 days.

Defiance. Since Heath's upset election in 1970, Britain has been pummeled by long strikes by dockers, electrical workers, postal and communications workers and coal miners, who forced large swatches of the country to do without heat or power for the better part of a rugged month last winter. Even before the dockers walked out again two weeks ago, Britain had already had enough strikes, wildcat walkouts, shutdowns, sitouts and other assorted stoppages to make 1972 the worst labor year since the great General Strike of 1926.

Not in years have Britain's usually fractionated workingmen been united in such a mood of disillusionment and defiance. The new mood promises to have profound impact on Britain's labor leaders (who are frequently ignored), on the country's entry into the Common Market (which is feared) and on the political system (which is deeply distrusted). The burst of labor outrage that followed the recent jailing of the "Pentonville Five" dockers on contempt-of-court charges was primarily aimed at Ted Heath's Tories, but the opposition Labor Party has not been immune. "As for the House of Commons," Bernie Holland, a porter at London's Covent Garden market, jeered last week, "in that club the Labor M.P.s are always getting up and apologizing for these unruly workers. We're all just the greedy, grasping workers."

An exultant London warehouseman told TIME Correspondent Friedel Ungeheuer: "It's finished, pitting workingman against workingman. We waved our little finger at the government and it had to give in"--a reference to the release of the Pentonville Five. A somewhat overdrawn cartoon on the cover of Private Eye, a satirical London fortnightly, captured the militant new mood. In it, a king-size Heath, wearing an army uniform, stands over a group of workers saying, "Back to work you bastards, or I'll shoot"; one of the workers answers, "Better dead than Ted."

Not long-ago the mood of Britain's 24.5 million wage earners--and particularly its 9,000,000 blue-collar workers--was one of idle complacency, summed up in the title of the 1959 Peter Sellers movie I'm All Right, Jack. But as workers from the picket lines along the Thames to the assembly lines in the Midlands are quick to protest, things are not all right any more.

For most of the postwar era, British labor has had the better of Britain's delicate, emotionally charged balance of industrial power. One result has been that while wages have been rising at a rate of 13% a year productivity has been rising at a rate of only 2%. The Heath government's labor reforms, not too different from those proposed earlier by Labor Party Chief Harold Wilson, aim at righting the balance, mainly by making unions (and their regally independent shop stewards) legally responsible for their actions--and inactions.

The prospect of an epic struggle over Heath's Industrial Relations Act thus looms at a time when British workers are already grappling unhappily with many other changes, large and small. In Dover, a dwindling force of 70 dockers (down from 120 a year ago) works with an ever-growing army of new blokes who drive fork lifts or pad about with time-study charts. In London's traditional "dock land," where the number of registered dock workers has declined from 25,000 to 16,000 in just five years, office buildings and housing estates rise on the sites of old piers and warehouses. Much to the distress of the dockers, shipping firms have been moving their containerized cargo operations inland, where labor costs can be as much as 40% cheaper--"the difference," says one employer, "between making a profit and making nothing."

Most worrisome of all, in a nation where the Great Depression is still a powerful memory, is the steady drumbeat of foreboding headlines. Hardly a day goes by without news that the heavily featherbedded nationalized steel industry is to cut its payroll by 50,000 workers, or that the railways are to let 20,000 go, or that a former Bank of England governor believes that unemployment--now 6% of the labor force --will have to double if things are to be "put right."

In the first three months of the year alone, 876 large and small British firms went out of business. When a modern, eight-year-old South London printing plant suddenly closed down last June, apparently because its owners saw a chance to sell the property for a quick real estate windfall, the firm's 150 employees angrily took over the place. "Most of us were not militant before this happened," says Journeyman Printer Norman Pennington, 30. "We will just not accept being put out to grass. Our children are redundant [excess labor] before they are even born!"

Conned. By and large the British workingman is living considerably better than he used to--and has the color TV and secondhand Cortina to prove it. But not everyone has fared equally well in the welfare state. Despite talk of layoffs in the Midlands assembly lines, Britain's seaside resorts are packed as usual with free-spending vacationing auto workers, whose pay checks run a full 15% above the national average blue-collar wage of $75 a week. The summer was somewhat different for Jerry Toomey, 29, a Jagger-haired $65-a-week warehouseman who lives with his wife and daughter in a dank, unheated flat in London's Elephant and Castle district while waiting for a two-bedroom place in a new slum-clearance project. Toomey worries that toothpaste is up to 800 a tube and that he recently had to pay $35 for dental work that once came free. Says he: "We have been conned, that's what."

What most of Britain's workers do have in common nowadays is what Oxford University Sociologist-Author (The Affluent Worker) John Goldthorpe describes as "a new, aggressive attitude." Says Goldthorpe: "They used to compare themselves to other manual workers in making their demands. But now, like their American counterparts, they have begun to say, 'There's more money in this job'--and ask for it." As Birmingham Toolmaker Eric Collins puts it: "Ordinary workers are waking up to the fact that the good life is theirs for the asking. All they have to do is pressure management."

The trouble is there is little more to be pressured out of Britain's threadbare economy. The British workingman's efforts to squeeze out more of the good life may yield only more inflation and more bitter class confrontation.

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