Human Status of the Worker in Industry—The Slowness of Ordinary Conciliation Machinery—The Whitley Councils Scheme—Joint National and District Industrial Councils—Works’ Committees—The Slow Progress of Works’ Committees—The Success of Works’ Committees on the Clyde—Executive Management a Matter for Employers.
The next most pressing reform in our present industrial system is to secure for the individual worker a definite status in industry. To describe what is intended is easier than to define it. At present the individual worker complains that the government of industry is conducted by the employer entirely as the latter thinks fit. He calls it the “domination of capital”; he describes himself as treated with scant or no consideration, and undoubtedly he draws all his industrial inspirations from an atmosphere in which there is little apparent development of his human personality. The worker is right and he is wrong. He forgets that the conduct of industry to-day is not a matter in the uncontrolled hands of any employer. He loses sight of the fact that in all well-organized industries the conditions of employment which prevail have been the matter of extensive adjustment between the employers’ organizations and the Trade Unions, negotiated, of course, centrally beyond the horizon of the individual worker.
The real feeling that the worker is trying to express is his sense of personal insignificance in a great factory, accentuated, when grievances arise, by the difficulty, in large works, of securing prompt discussion of them between the workers and the management. All that can be done is for the worker to report the matter to the shop steward of his particular craft in the department, who will no doubt report it to the secretary of his Trade Union district committee. The latter will put it forward for consideration by the committee and take their instructions upon it, and the committee will, in course of time, send down him or the district delegate to the works to see the employer. A discussion will take place, the results of which the district delegate will report back to the district committee. If the matter is amicably settled there is an end of it; if, on the other hand, it still remains in dispute, the district committee may decide to refer it to the executive council of their Union. The executive council will then remit it to the central organization of the employers, to be considered by them at their next meeting. The matter may be then adjusted, or it may be left over for discussion at one of the periodical joint central conferences. While this ponderous machinery is functioning the individual worker is left face to face with the remembrance of his grievance, and it is not surprising that he gradually acquires a sense of inferiority and a feeling of being neglected, through his ignorance that the mills of conciliation grind slowly. The object first and foremost must be to adapt existing, or provide new, machinery in all industries to enable grievances to be speedily discussed in the works in which they arise. It may be found when they are investigated that they involve some issue common to all the works in the district engaged in the same industry. Obviously, then, that is a matter to be discussed between the district employers and the district committees of the Trade Unions, or through the district conciliation machinery, whatever it may be. In course of the district discussions it may be ascertained that the matters of controversy have raised some national question, then, obviously, for the sake of industrial uniformity, these questions should be considered nationally between the organizations representing all the employers in the country engaged in the particular industry and the Trade Unions representing the men, or through the appropriate national conciliation machinery.
These are the general lines along which, as Part II shows, industrial conciliation machinery has developed. In the highly organized industries, there is machinery, district and national, but not as a rule works’ committees. The drawback in all industries is the delay.
The want of such machinery became apparent in many imperfectly organized industries in the early part of the war, and in October 1916, “the Whitley Committee” was appointed by the Prime Minister with the following terms of reference:
(1) To make and consider suggestions for securing a permanent improvement in the relations between employers and workmen.
(2) To recommend means for securing that industrial conditions affecting the relations between employers and workmen should be systematically reviewed by those concerned, with a view to improving conditions in the future.
Of this Committee the present Speaker of the House of Commons, the Right Hon. J. H. Whitley, was Chairman. It comprised representatives of the employers and also of the Trade Unions engaged in some of the great industries. The Committee presented five reports recommending what is now known as the Whitley Councils Scheme.
In its first Report (Parliamentary Paper, 1917, Cd. 8606) the Committee recommended the establishment for each of the principal industries of a triple form of organization, representative of employers and employed, consisting of National Joint Councils, Joint District Councils and Works’ Committees, each of the three forms of organization being linked up with the others, so as to constitute an organization covering the whole of the trade, capable of considering and advising upon matters affecting the welfare of the industry and giving to Labour a definite and enlarged share in the discussion and settlement of industrial matters with which employers and employed are jointly concerned, each Council and Committee exercising such powers and duties as are determined by negotiation between the employers and the Trade Unions in the industry in question.
As part of its second Report (Parliamentary Paper, 1918, Cd. 9002) the Committee proposed for trades in which organization is weak or non-existent the adoption of the system of Trade Boards, and for trades in which organization was considerable, but not yet comprehensive, a system of Joint Councils, with Government assistance, to be dispensed with in each case as soon as these industries advanced to the stage when the full organization could successfully be created for them. The Committee also proposed a scheme in its second Report under which the National Joint Council of an industry, once it had agreed upon a minimum standard of working conditions for those employed in the industry, could secure the enforcement of those conditions either throughout a given district or over the whole country.
Prominently in its third Report (Parliamentary Paper, 1918, Cd. 9085) the Whitley Committee emphasized once more the need for the constitution in each factory or workshop, where the circumstances of the industry permitted, of a Works’ Committee, representative of the management and the men and women employed, to meet regularly to consider questions peculiar to the individual factory or workshop which affected the life and comfort of the workers.
In the Committee’s fourth Report (Parliamentary Paper, 1918, Cd. 9099) it recommended the establishment of a standing Arbitration Tribunal to deal with cases where the two sides of a Joint Industrial Council had failed to come to an agreement and wished to refer the dispute for settlement by arbitration.
The far-sighted proposals of the Whitley Committee represent the machinery that is necessary if the government of industry is to be a matter of mutual arrangement between the employers and the employed. Great progress has already been made in establishing Whitley Councils; in some industries they have operated remarkably well, and have succeeded in conferring a very considerable measure of joint self-government on employers and employed. But in other industries where they have been started they have not worked so satisfactorily. On paper no doubt the number of National Joint Industrial Councils which have been established appears large, and the number of Joint District Councils substantial, but their effect in avoiding disputes in some industries is negligible. The reason, in my opinion, is that too much attention has been paid to setting up National Councils and too little to forming Works’ Committees. Progress would have been much more marked if employers generally had been prepared to press forward more enthusiastically with the constitution of Works’ Committees—they are the crux of the position. It is they which deal directly with the individual worker who is necessarily out of personal touch with the Joint National or District Councils.
There are several explanations of employers’ want of sympathy with Works’ Committees. In a number of establishments where they were formed the workers used them to deal, not with matters in which the employer and the employed were jointly interested, but with matters of executive responsibility solely appertaining to the employer. This was done sometimes out of keenness, sometimes out of ignorance; in some localities it was a definite attempt on the part of revolutionary elements to use these workshop committees as a means of acquiring the control of the industry. Again, enforcements of discipline were treated as illustrations of the “domination of capital” and tabled by the workers as matters for joint agreement. In some works, it has been surprising to me how far employers have been able to go in discussing matters of discipline, even to the extent of making dismissals for infraction of works’ rules a matter for consideration by the workshop committee. That, I am afraid, is a course which cannot be recommended. I have had some experience of the endless agitation which simmered in one yard where that particular plan was followed.
In the stormy days on the Clyde in the spring of 1916, I had, as Chairman of the Government Commission for Dilution of Labour, remarkable proofs of the extent to which workshop committees, when loyally supported by employers, operate to create industrial contentment. Up to that time the skilled men in the engineering shops on the Clyde had firmly refused to comply with the “Treasury” Agreements of March 1915, accepted on ballot by their own Trade Union, and declined absolutely to permit any woman to be introduced for the purpose of doing work previously done by a man or even a boy. The Executive Council of the A.S.E. confessed their entire inability to persuade their Clyde members to comply with the Agreement, and left the matter to the Clyde District Committee. We, as a Commission, found the Clyde District Committee willing to assist, but powerless. It then occurred to us that the best way to achieve our purpose of introducing women was to establish in each workshop a workshop committee consisting of an equal number of workers and management. We explained the scheme of dilution to the committee, leaving it to be discussed between the men on the one side and the management on the other, all information being given and objections, so far as possible, being met by us in the course of the discussion. The workers’ side of the committee would then report to a mass meeting of the workers and come back in a day’s time to a further meeting of the committee, when adjustments, if necessary, would be made by us in the scheme. The result was truly amazing; the men who previously had been adamant against dilution soon realized there was no desire on our part to force some cast-iron proposal down their throats, and that there was a definite opportunity reserved to them as of right for discussing matters, for eliciting information on doubtful aspects, for pointing out and securing a remedy for objectionable features and for introducing safeguards for the protection of their craft. Hostility softened into suspicion, suspicion mellowed into confidence, and confidence in time begat co-operation. Almost insensibly the scope of these committees widened by general consent, and other workshop grievances, apart altogether from dilution, were submitted for discussion and disposed of in the same amicable way. The engineering employers on the Clyde wholeheartedly supported the scheme, and a number of them voluntarily took the initiative in enlarging the sphere of matters to be discussed. It should not be forgotten that this was in one of the most revolutionary districts of the country, where for their own purposes extremists had been long fomenting workshop grievances. When those grievances were remedied in this way there was very little left for the extremists to turn to their own ulterior ends, and the Clyde settled down. After the Commission was dissolved in October 1916, by the Ministry of Munitions, which did not like to see an outside authority doing successfully what it had previously failed to do, the influence for good of these committees rapidly declined under the hard hand of bureaucratic control.
At first I had entertained fears of Trade Union hostility to workshop committees, because local delegates are apt to think that the discussion of workshop grievances is a matter entirely for them, which, if appropriated by a workshop committee, may impair the necessity for their official existence. This difficulty, however, we surmounted in a very simple way. The committee consisted as a rule of seven or eight members elected by the workers in the shop, and an equal number of the representatives of the management. Notice of any meeting of the committee and of the agenda before the committee would be sent to the district delegate of the Union concerned, who would be invited ex-officio, if he cared, to attend and take part in the proceedings. As a rule the delegate invariably did attend, and his presence was most helpful.
In the course of six months’ work the Clyde Commission established nearly 200 workshop committees which met each week, and had the satisfaction of seeing them dispose of workshop grievances and other works disputes in a harmonious, business-like and effective manner. It produced the best possible feeling among the men; they felt—as many of them told me personally—they were no longer under the heel of the foreman, but had an opportunity of putting their complaints fully before the management, being called, of course, as witnesses by the workers’ side of the committee. They felt, they said, that their labour was being no longer treated as merely raw material in industry, and that they had at last attained a human status. This, however, we did insist upon, that a worker had to go through the constitutional shop procedure for disposing of his grievance before it could be brought up at a meeting of the committee; in other words, if shop procedure provided for the question being dealt with by the foreman with an appeal from him to the manager, that it should be exhausted before the committee could take the matter up. In the same way the worker had to exhaust his Trade Union procedure, reporting the matter, it may be, to his shop steward, who would follow the progress of the controversy in the accustomed manner.
The cause of what I hope is only a temporary stoppage in the progress of Joint Councils and Works’ Committees is due to the fact that extreme sections of Labour have taken the view that these Councils and Committees seriously interfere with their projects of bringing industry to an end, so as to enable the workers to acquire control of it, and have, therefore, instigated the workers in certain districts to advance demands going to the very root of the employer’s right and responsibility to manage his business, which do not admit of discussion. The employers rightly have objected to this. But for the way in which moderate workmen have unwittingly lent themselves to these tactics, there is no doubt that the scheme for Works’ Committees would have made greater headway. To give an actual illustration: One of our mammoth liners, in shipyard after being repaired, required a few hours’ overtime on the part of six fitters to enable her to go to her home port to load for departure. The fitters refused to work overtime until the matter was discussed between their shop steward and the management; a discussion took place, the former would not agree, and insisted on convening his workshop committee in a couple of days. The ship was all this time being detained, and eventually had to sail, as she could wait no longer, but as a result of the delay, she missed the tide at her home port. While a limitation on the total amount of overtime to be worked per working week is a matter for legitimate agreement between management and men, when and how the overtime is to be worked is obviously a question for the management. The Whitley machinery is admirable, but however excellent it may be, it can do nothing unless there is the right spirit on both sides—a spirit of compromise and mutual endeavour to arrive at some fair and equitable basis of self-government, leaving it to the employer to manage his works in accordance with the principles that have been agreed. Labour cannot seek to settle the principles by negotiation, and in addition manage the works. No employer claims to dictate what the principles shall be.