Trade Union Rules and Munition Output

Progress, Volume XI, Issue 9, 1 May 1916, Page 623

Trade Union Rules and Munition Output

By ROBT. WHITSON, Engineer. As lone’ ago as June 1915, Mr. Lloyd George, in addressing the munition workers of the Clyde and North of England stated definitely that the Trade Union rules were restricting the output of war munitions. This w'as of course vigorously combated by the leaders of the men, though they strove by every means in their power to keep the output down to that of normal times. These labour leaders were certainly not patriots. They were obstructionists, and as such, worthy of the most severe condemnation, and although they had many excellent arguments from their point of view, they altogether failed to put forward any statement in defence of their actions that could hope to survive the expression of national opinion.

The first open resentment shown to the demand for an increased output occurred when American and Swiss workmen were first employed in the English workshops, side by side with the English Trade Unionist. The results obtained by these imported workmen far exceeded the most optimistic hopes of the masters themselves, and threw the British Trade Unionist into a fever of apprehension as to the continuity of his employment. Despite the fact that the American workmen were in many instances called upon to turn out work on adapted machines, (machines that from their point of view were obsolete by many years), in cases they increased the output of those machines sixty-eight per cent, in a given time, over the best results previously obtained by men who had been handling them all their lives. This was an unanswerable result, and it simply meant that the Trade Unionist had to admit a restriction of production, or else admit to a sixty-eight per cent, inferiority as a machine worker. The Government endeavoured by every means in its power to get the British worker to look at matters from a broader point of view, but although a certain amount of speeding up was effected, the result still fell far short of the foreign workers efforts. The Trade Unions ostensibly made a heavy concession to the Government, when they promised in July last to remove the trade restrictions that prevented the employment of non-union labour. We say ostensibly, because when the issue came to be tried out in the workshops, it was found that the preventative clauses were not really withdrawn, but merely held in abeyance in order to gain time that the Trade Unions might gauge just how far the Government meant to exploit the new powers supposedly given it by the agreement entered into. The Government in a further effort to induce the men to increase the output to at least a reasonoble extent, gave the Trade Unions an official assurance that as far as the Government and Government workshops were concerned, that "nothing done in time of war would be considered a precedent after the war was over." This was of course, as far as

the Government could possibly go, and one does not doubt that it was promised in good faith, but the Trade Union leaders in their statements and instructions to the workmen, pointed out that neither the Government nor private employers were likely after the war to allow output of work to slide back to pre-war figures, when once they had discovered that the men and machines were capable of further efforts.

This leads to two natural deductions. One is that the Trade Union leaders, who are presumably thinking men have acted as deliberate traitors to both their country and to the men depending on their efforts at the front, and the other is that the British workman, under his present leaders, has no intention of working to his full capacity either now or in times of peace.

The introduction of female labour has been a revelation both to masters and men, and while the former are contemplating the retention of female labour wherever possible even after the war, the latter are hard put to it to find an explanation for the state of things as at present disclosed. An instance is quoted by one of the leading English papers which states that in one of the large munition factories woman labour was employed on machines where only so-called skilled men had been employed hitherto. They were employed on precisely the same work, and whereas the men were able by working three hours overtime daily, to turn out seven hundred and fifty machined parts per diem, the women are to-day finishing oat one thousand per day without overtime. Could a worse example of deliberate slacking be found than this, and yet these men know well and have been told hundreds of times since the war started, that it is not their time or their wages that they are playing with, but the lives of their one-time shop mates!

The men, though doubtless in some part to blame, are not the chief offenders, for after all the British workman is not a highly trained thinking machine, but the callous individuals who act the part of leaders, and who by -a plausible style of jingo oratory wilfully cloud the far reaching issues of the workmen's actions, are not only a disgrace to the nation they claim as. their own, but are active helpers of the German cause.