Great Britain: All Aboard Again

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Prime Minister Harold Wilson had promised to disclose the names of "the tightly knit group of politically motivated men" responsible for prolonging Britain's crippling seamen's strike. Last week he did, but it was a bit anticlimactic. Everyone knew he had Communists in mind, but it turned out that they were Communists everybody knew about: eight prominent labor spokesmen of Britain's Communist Party who, admitted Wilson, had behaved in an entirely legal fashion throughout the six-week dispute.

What worried Wilson was a subtler point in the workings of industrial democracy. Unlike any other major pressure group, the Reds throw into a labor dispute "an efficient and disciplined industrial apparatus," said Wilson, "controlled from Communist Party headquarters." He noted that there was no major strike anywhere in Britain in which this apparatus was not involved, and that the Reds had officers "ready to operate in any situation where industrial troubles are developing." As a result, the Communists often seized the leadership of the strikers from their moderate elements. That, he said, had happened in the seamen's strike, where the moderates lacked the "guts" to settle equitably sooner.

Next day, as if to prove his point, the Seamen's Union executive council, non-Communists all, voted an end to the 45-day-old strike that had idled 26,000 seamen, tied up some 900 ships, and may already have cost the British economy perhaps as much as $300 million. There was no reason not to, since the seamen had obtained nearly everything they wanted: a reduction of the work week to 40 hr. by next June (meaning more overtime), plus the promise of a whopping 48 days of annual leave. The settlement will increase the shipowners' labor costs at least 9.5% over a two-year period, shattering Wilson's 3.5% annual-increase guideline against inflation. Even so, the Communists and many of the more militant union members were still not satisfied, and might vent their unhappiness with wildcat strikes on some docks.