Labour policy—false and true

My endeavour, henceforward, will be to state, as concisely and clearly as the subject permits, the main principles of policy which, in my judgment, should be applied to industry and its problems. As a necessary preliminary one must indicate the characteristics of the worker, his sentiments and aspirations, his defects, his virtues. After years of continual intercourse with labour, I confess my failure to meet in the flesh the workers as depicted in current revolutionary publications; nor have I succeeded in discovering among them that alien race with sympathies and sensibilities different from those of the rest of the community, ever moved by materialistic motives, always pursuing some irrational course of foolish selfishness as described in another type of literature. Against the unwarranted accusation that the British working-man in his opinions, feelings and sentiments is at all a different person from the ordinary British citizen, I have never ceased to protest. That he often suffers from a limited outlook, reacts to prejudice, and cherishes at times a grudge against society, I am not going to deny; but after working among workers, and, later, spending a great part of the war-period in controlling one million workmen of every description, and meeting in familiar intercourse their Trade Union executives, their district committees and their own deputations in numerous shops and yards, I can truthfully say that I generally found the worker a human being who is open to reason and to acceptance of a view substantially fair and just, once his ignorance is dissipated, his prejudices removed, and his humanity recognized. He has, however, no patience for humbug, rhetoric or cant. The trouble is that he has not been treated in the past as a sentient and rational person by politicians, or even his own Trade Union leaders—the main cause of our present industrial difficulties.

Ignorance about Industry

When in retrospect I recall my impression of the outstanding characteristic of the British working-man as I knew him in the workshops, I unhesitatingly fasten on his appalling ignorance of economic matters. Few of the “rank and file” have any conception whatsoever of the factors and forces which constitute that type of economic activity known as industry, still less of the contribution of industry to our national prosperity. And in regard to commerce and its part as the handmaiden of industry, their ignorance is even more profound. There never plays upon their imagination the least glimpse of the wonderful complexity of the mechanism of finance nor of the amazingly intricate organization of buying and selling. Who can blame them—they have never been told. I have kept a meeting of workmen keenly interested for an hour, after the conclusion of some official business, in a simple explanation of the functions played by finance in industry, and of the various kinds of financial operations entailed in the marketing of the product of their particular factory. Workmen respond to sympathetic education with cheerful alacrity. One of the expedients to which the Department of Shipyard Labour resorted was the institution of talks with workmen in various ship-repairing districts of the rôles being played in the stirring circumstances of the times by naval and merchant ships which were in dry-dock in local shipyards for reconditioning or repair. It had a most stimulating effect; men found themselves no longer sluggishly working upon an uninspiring metal hulk, but upon a living ship redolent with stirring associations, engaged in performing for the nation functions and duties which they could readily understand. There was less time lost, less sleeping on night-work, fewer stoppages of work; greater expedition, larger output.

Misconceptions as to Wages

The rate of wages is a matter ever present to the mind of the worker. It is the question of most general discussion in normal times; but at all times there is a strange failure to appreciate the true facts of the position. The average workman thought, before the war, that his employer was always able to raise his rate of wages, if not to the particular level demanded, at any rate sufficiently to afford a substantial increase, and that only the employer’s selfishness stood in the way of this being done. Such most certainly was the opinion generally entertained by Labour when, during the war, the State became virtually the employer. Time after time bodies of workmen told me in perfect good faith that there was no difficulty whatever in the Government paying the rate of wages which they claimed. It seemed to them wholly immaterial that they were being paid, not out of the product of their work, but out of money borrowed by the State, with all the consequent inflation of currency and rise of prices. While, at the end of the war, many of the more enlightened Labour leaders appreciated, and a few, whom I honour, publicly denounced, the futility of the mad race of wages after prices, the average workman never was able to grasp it. There was a simple way, he thought, of compensating him for increased prices—merely to raise wages. Much of our industrial trouble to-day is due to the spurious appearance of prosperity which was caused by the high nominal wages of the war-period, and to the notion engendered in the mind of Labour that the Government could now, by resorting once more to war-time methods of controlling industry, create the same prosperity as existed immediately after the war. There is a foolish belief even among moderate men that the Government refrains from doing so in the interests of employers, in order to bring about a reduction of wages and a retrogression in conditions of employment, and to weaken the power of the Trade Unions.

Discontent and its Causes

One who moves among the workers cannot fail to be struck with the discontent which permeates them. Some people call it “industrial unrest,” and condemn it as a menace to society; they forget that discontent with existing conditions is an essential element of progress. Society advances, not by uniform and rhythmic strides in a fixed direction, but by convulsive movements which, if plotted on a plan, would present the appearance of gyrations to right and left of the axis of progression, but generally register a forward march. In our democratic organization of society, where the mutual relations of constituent elements of the community are so generally governed by common-sense compromise, no section that was passive could ever hope to better its social conditions.

There are several causes for the prevalent dissatisfaction, of which probably the most potent is the increasing standard of education. Those who take the trouble to compare the education of our industrial classes of to-day with the lack of education of the workers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as described in some of the first Factory Inspectors’ reports, cannot fail to realize what enormous progress has been achieved; and this progress has—and happily so—given birth to a new vision. One of the first effects of education is to stimulate aspirations for improvement of material conditions, and the social observer generally finds that the first aspirations created in this direction by education are frequently not kept within the bounds which a fuller education and a wider experience ultimately impose.

Effect of Bad Environment

As, during the decades immediately before the war, the outlook of the workers widened under the influence of education, and especially as a result of the facilities for travel from the towns into the country for holidays and recreation, there has arisen an increasing dissatisfaction with industrial surroundings and home conditions. Nor is that surprising. Owing to the aggregation of factories during the industrial revolution, as near as possible to the centre of towns, and the huddling of houses in crowded, fetid and ill-built courts, as near as possible to the factories, a condition of things grew up, and indeed in many large towns still continues, more than sufficient to cause industrial discontent. Men are told by Socialist proselytizers the plausible story that such a state of things is one of the inevitable concomitants of the capitalistic organization of industry—a statement quite untrue. What caused it was the impotence of municipal organization in those days to control town planning or regulate the construction of streets and erection of houses, and the insufficient development of the social conscience as to the things which ought to be done for the good of the community. Some of our successful leaders of industry have conclusively demonstrated, by the most convincing of tests—viz., the commercial success of their venture—that there is no necessary connection whatsoever between bad industrial environment and the prosperity of their “capitalistic” works. Take for example Lord Leverhulme’s beautiful garden village at Port Sunlight, and many similar model villages connected with other industrial undertakings. Nothing more conduces to industrial contentment than a comfortable home; no one can expect contentment in the occupants of many of the old houses which still disgrace some of our industrial centres, with their leaky roofs, rotten floors, muddy backyards and general structural decay, in which it is impossible to keep things nice, or children tidy, or household effects clean. Our municipalities are doing great work in sweeping away dwellings of this kind. Their final disappearance is a matter of expense and rates, for removal is costly. Local authorities are performing wonders in keeping, so far as they can, old buildings fit for human habitation, but there is a limit to the process of patching up ancient and dilapidated houses.

Fear of Unemployment

Another active cause of industrial discontent is insecurity of employment. If this week a man is in work and has no certainty of work next week—a condition even in normal times of large numbers of the industrial population—he is persistently oppressed by a desolating fear. Want of work is the menacing spectre which haunts the background of every working-class home. Intermittent employment produces serious decay of human fibres and moral degeneration—an inevitable result of the discouragement caused by fruitless seeking after work, and of the shifts to find food for wife and family. The inability to organize any uniform routine of living leads straight away to improvidence: when a man is in work one week, he spends all he has, relying on continuance of the work; next week, if unemployed, he has nothing except perhaps some unemployment pay or benefits. It is systematically rubbed into him by exponents of Socialism that unemployment is solely caused by the capitalistic organization of industry, that there can be none under the Socialists’ regime, as if any socialistic scheme for the reorganization of industry is going to compel the consumer to buy more commodities and services than he would be prepared, or able, to buy under capitalistic production.

Dissatisfaction with Status in Industry

A contributing cause to industrial discontent of growing moment is what the worker describes as the denial to him of a human status in industry. He complains, especially in the matter of being taken on or discharged or put on overtime or night-work, indeed, with respect to the whole conditions of his employment, that little or no regard is paid to him as a human being. He is content to accept the theory of the Labour intellectuals—it is certainly not his own conception—that he is a wage-slave taken on and discharged just as it suits his employer’s interests, and that his labour is bought and sold on the same principles as any other raw material in industry. The old paternal relation of employer and employed, unfortunately much weakened by the introduction of the factory system, has undoubtedly disappeared with the conversion of family businesses into vast joint-stock company concerns; personal touch between the master and his men no longer exists. There is, however, no ground for suggesting—as Socialists are fond of instilling into the minds of the workers—that this is still another inevitable result of the capitalistic organization of industry. In some of the largest and greatest of capitalistic works, workers can be, and to my knowledge are, treated with consideration and sympathy. Their human values can always be respected and full human status accorded to them if only the right spirit prevails between employers and employed, and proper machinery exists for its infusion into workshop life.

Belief in Agitation

Discontent, expressed in constant agitation, has unfortunately been of practical value; that is one reason why it is so rife in industry to-day. No substantial increases in wages or improvement in working conditions have, in the past, been conceded voluntarily by employers, but only after pressure by the Unions, subject, of course, to considerable qualifications in special cases. It is more or less inevitable that it should be so, having regard to the way in which the machinery of collective bargaining has been operated by both sides. Every time, when an increase of wages, or an improvement in conditions is demanded and refused, and then ultimately given under threat of a strike, it feeds the springs of future discontent and confirms in the workers’ minds the efficacy of agitation. In the latter days of the war the unsettled condition of industry was largely due to the fact that in the earlier days wage-increases had been refused and then conceded by the Government under pressure of strikes and threats of stoppages by the workers. Each time such capitulations took place it seriously ministered to the spirit of discontent.

Desire for Improvement

When one turns to other forces now commencing to pulsate through Labour, one is impressed by the increasing general desire for mental and cultural improvement, at times pathetic in its search for simple gratifications. Some persons scoff at this seeking after higher things by the working-classes; their scorn is ill-timed, and their irony misdirected. There is rapidly developing, I am glad to say, an increasing movement in this direction. Those engaged in social work in our great industrial centres can testify to the innumerable ways in which this aspiration is finding healthy expression.

More than one foreign observer has recorded his opinion that the stability of the British Constitution is materially due to the strong attachment to, and sentiment for, family life that prevail in this country. No member of the community is a stronger supporter of family life than the British working-man; no one is prepared to make more substantial sacrifices for its maintenance and preservation, no one more frequently has to make them. In this respect the British worker is one of the greatest living individualists, and the strength of his family individualism will never let him be converted into a thoroughgoing Communist. Theorists may talk to him till tired of working for the State and the community—I had to use that argument in war-time—he will answer them, as I have been answered on the Clyde: “I work for the wife and bairns.”

Low Conception of Work

In regard to his conception of work the British working-man is hopelessly wrong in his outlook. Some find pleasure in work; the manual worker is not one of them. He has come to regard work as a species of thraldom, instituted, not for his profit or improvement, but solely for the maintenance of his employer and the swelling of his profits. This, of course, is merely a weak dilution of the Marxian fallacy. The modern manual worker, because he has never been taught to look upon work as a moral duty or upon industry as one of the highest forms of national service, sees no dignity in work, and is sensible of no obligation incumbent on him to work to the best of his ability or even for the duration of the working day. The number of expedients to which I have known manual workers resort—in other respects honest, upright men—in order to scamp the job, or cut time, would be perfectly surprising to those not conversant with industry. To-day the moral obligation to work seems inverted into a duty to do as little as possible for the wages. Sometimes the motive is to make the job last longer, at other times, to assist unemployment by making work go round, and, where remuneration is based on payment by results, for less altruistic reasons, to force up the prices paid for the job. But although the Marxian doctrine—that the more work an employee does the more he contributes to the betrayal of his brother workers by assisting the employer to amass illicit gains out of their exploitation—explains much of the work-shyness and “ca-canny” of to-day, there are other reasons. One is the extent to which work is subdivided in modern factory organization. In an engineering shop, a job done thirty or forty years ago by a skilled man on a general purpose machine is now subdivided into a large number of constituent operations. These will be performed by different workers on different semi-automatic machines, and the finished part will be assembled by another set of workers into the final product. In the old days the tradesman saw the finished article gradually taking shape under his creative craftsmanship; to-day no worker sees anything but the single operation which he performs. As a result, there is little to minister to the instincts of a craftsman. The workman employed on such repetition work becomes quickly apathetic, his interest relaxes, his inventiveness atrophies, his initiative dies, he degenerates into a cog, and, being human, into an inefficient cog, in the vast mechanism of industry. These methods of mass production are quite inevitable in modern efficient practice, and the only antidote is to encourage the workers to acquire a wider interest in industry, and in the prosperity of the works in which they are employed, and to cultivate a spirit of culture so that their minds may be filled with other things which satisfy their human aspirations, and replace the noble satisfaction which a tradesman used to feel as the creation of his handicraft grew beneath his skill.

Suspicion of Employers

If asked what was the strongest sentiment I found permeating the workshops, I should answer, suspicion of employers. In some districts it is worse than in others; in some works it is worse than in other works in the same district. Many reasons have been advanced for its existence, but the real explanation is simple. Between the fifties and the eighties of last century, when the machinery of collective bargaining was coming into operation, the principle of action adopted by many employers was “enlightened self-interest”—the individualistic theory that an employer best served his own interests, and, automatically by so doing the best interests of the country, by furthering on all occasions his own advantage. To call this greed or selfishness is wrong. It implied no callous disregard of the rights of the workers, but it did involve such a bias of mind that the interests of employees were subordinated in the scheme of industry to those of the employers. In the course of collective bargaining, of manœuvring for position, of higgling, many managements contracted the habit of seizing upon any circumstances which might enable them to cut piece-rates and time-allowances, bring down wages, revise conditions of employment, and adopted the invariable attitude of resisting all the demands of their employees. Such employers have disappeared, but “the evil that men do lives after them.” Not unnaturally, the workers learned to decipher some hostile motive behind each action of their employer, however apparently beneficent, and regarded everything he did with unalloyed suspicion, and as calling for the closest scrutiny. This is the cause of the want of confidence in the industrial atmosphere to-day. While it continues so charged with mistrust, confidence between all persons concerned in industry, which is necessary for production and essential for smooth running of the industrial machine, can never flourish. All employers unreservedly now deprecate this unhappy condition of things, many have gone to exceptional trouble to dissipate the blight on industry of such distrust, but memories are long, industrial prejudices tenacious, and it will take time and much effort to forge a bond of trust.

The Worker and his Trade Union

The attitude of the British worker to his Trade Union reflects the British temperament. Abroad one sees the workers follow their Unions in matters both industrial and political; in this country there is no such general surrender of individual judgment. So far as industrial questions are concerned, with the exception of some smaller Unions whose members seem always in a seething condition of revolt, and certain revolutionary elements in some of the great Unions, the majority of Trade Unionists will follow their own Union leaders. That, however, is a very different thing from following the general lead of the combined Trade Unions as expressed through the Trades Union Congress or the Labour Party. As one result of the craft organization of industry in this country, which at times during the war showed signs of disintegration but now seems more firmly established than ever, the Unions are almost as suspicious of one another’s motives—a result of the fear of one trade invading the other’s work—as Labour in the mass is suspicious of the employers. Where, however, a question is, rightly or wrongly, represented to involve a principle directly affecting the common interests of all workers, the Trade Unionist has been so well drilled in the virtue of solidarity that he will, generally, range himself under the banner of organized Labour. In regard to political matters there is no such docility, although compelled to contribute to his Union’s political fund. To-day he is forced to do so, in spite of his power to object under the Trade Union Act 1913; if the Trade Union Act (1913) Amendment Bill 1922 passes, he will not be liable unless he expressly agrees. There is evidence of independence in the results of the General Election in 1918 and of by-elections since, where very large sections of the workers have voted, not for the official Labour candidate, but for the candidate of another political party opposing Labour. This fact undoubtedly explains the strenuous efforts of the Labour Party to formulate a composite political programme which will appear to its Trade Unionist members as an industrial programme, and to non-industrial supporters as one primarily of a social character.

The Worker and the Community

The worker’s conception of himself in relation to the community invites a comment. As a substitute for a convincing argument that the interests of the worker are entirely separate from, and opposed to, those of the rest of the community organized on a capitalistic basis, the worker has been assiduously encouraged to develop his “class-consciousness.” If by any process of auto-suggestion he can convince himself that what tends to promote the general common weal does not tend to further the interests of Labour, but generally runs counter to them, he may more surely be relied on to adopt an attitude of militant antagonism to continuance of the present organization of industry and society. The efforts of extremists are continually directed to foment this feeling of class-consciousness until it culminates in class-warfare. I have had wide opportunities for gauging the prevalence and depth of the sentiment, and though one found it in active operation among certain groups of men on the Clyde, in Barrow, on the Mersey, and in a few other centres of advanced industrial thought, I never encountered much of it amongst the general body of working-men. They do not accept the proposition that they stand, as beings apart, in a separate category from the rest of the community. Indeed, in the latter days of the war, many Unions, recognizing the interests of their members as consumers rather than as producers, abandoned the policy of increasing wages and strongly urged the regulation of prices instead, so much did the circumstances of consumption affecting their members as citizens exceed in importance matters touching their special interests as workers.

One may carry this a stage further. In spite of the ranting of extremists that the war was an effort of capitalists to advance their own financial ends, and utterly inimical to the interests of the workers, Labour in this country stood shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the community and willingly underwent the greatest sacrifices both in the matter of military service and in regard to the suspension of Trade Union rights and customs. Had the Government at the beginning of the war courageously conscribed every person for national service, many galling disparities would never have arisen, and gross inequalities of sacrifice would have been forestalled, the aggravation of which, towards the end of the war, and not without justification, upset the equanimity of the workers and caused serious industrial upheavals. It should never be forgotten that in the early days of the war universal national service was strongly urged by prominent Labour leaders, but was killed by the cries of “Business as usual,” for which members of the Government were alone responsible.