Political Commentary By JANUS
Page 54
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Worthy of His Hire
GRADE 2 wages sound inferior in every way, and not merely financially. The campaign for their elimination, which again failed last week, has always had the psychological advantage of appearing to remove from the men concerned the stigma of being known as grade 2 drivers.
There is no reason, apart from the inertia of custom, why the term should remain in use. When there were three grades of wages, in addition to the London scale. numbering had its advantages and was the best way of indicating the order of remuneration. Abolition of grade 3 some 10 years ago gave employers in the road haulage industry the opportunity, which they failed to take, to change the titles of the remaining three grades. so that there would now be London. provincial and rural wages, and everybody would know at once what was meant.
The employers' representatives on the Road Haulage Wages Council could have gone further and attempted to define the distinction between provincial and rural. or grade 1 and grade 2. They could have established firm qualifications, such as the minimum population before a town could claim to be provincial. It is true that at the time there might have been an immediate agitation for a change in the status of a large number of places not then included in grade 1 areas, but many of these have since been up-graded. so that the ultimate result would have been much the same, whatever the procedure.
After the initial adjustments, the industry would have had a clear wages pattern, on the map at least. The London area has already been well defined. Whatever criteria were established would fix the boundaries of the provincial areas. Any rural area that was subsequently able to satisfy these criteria would automatically be uplifted. An arrangement on these lines would be difficult to upset once the Wages Council had agreed to it. As everybody knows, there are distinct differences in the cost of living in London, the provinces and the country. These differences ought to be firmly embedded in any national scale of wages. In the road haulage industry, up-grading has depended. or has seemed to depend. too much upon caprice.
Grand Strategy
A piecemeal or a comprehensive onslaught on the grading system forms part of the grand strategy of the trade unions. What one would like to see is some evidence that the employers are also working to a coherent plan. whether they are dealing with grading or any other matter. Admittedly, they are in a difficult situation. In a period of inflation, they must largely leave the initiative to the unions, who take full advantage of it with a skill that compels admiration.
Where possible, they play off British Road Services against the independent hauliers, hauliers against B.R.S., and even the National Joint Industrial Council against the Wages Council. They maintain a regular succession of applications, sometimes for a "substantial rise" all round, sometimes for more specialized concessions, such as were contained in the proposal to abolish grade 2 wages and the abortive attempt to make the overtime rate begin at time-and-a-half.
Concessions of this kind are doubly useful in that they pave the way for later applications.. When there is no more grade 2, the urban workers will complain that
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it is unfair they should receive the same wages as their country cousins, whose cost of living is so much lower; and they will ask to be put on the Metropolitan level.
If this request is granted, London workers will insist on maintaining the differential. The rural workers will then come in again, and so it will continue. Similarly, if time-and-a-half became the lowest multiple for overtime rates, it would be represented as insufficient for work for which it was at present paid. The demand would then be for time-and-three-quarters or double time, and then the problem of payment where double time was already the rule would arise.
Against this constant chivvying, the tactics of the employers' representatives are of little use. Invariably, they wait for an application from the unions and then prepare their case to answer it. This they have been doing practically ever since the wages machinery was set up, and it is only fair to say that over the years they have improved the quality and calibre of their weapons, without changing the basic type. They are now somewhat better supplied than before with facts and figures to support their points, but they are still fighting the present war with the weapons of the last.
Out-marneuvred
Perhaps the employers fight the less effectively because their heart is no longer in the struggle. They realize clearly enough that industrial relations are no longer settled by an all-out slogging match, but time and again they are manceuvred into a situation where they seem to be grinding the workers down. The remedy in such circumstances is to think the situation out afresh.
A good driver is worth his weight in gold, and although hauliers might not agree that wages ought to be up to the gold standard, they do not hesitate to express the opinion that drivers ought to be well paid. An employer will usually pay extra to get the right man. On the other hand, it does not need the exhortations of the Chancellor of the Exchequer or of other Cabinet Ministers to establish that there.is a limit to the capacity of trade and industry to pay higher wages.
Britain depends upon exports, and the prices of her goods in foreign markets must not rise above a certain level. This level establishes the standard of wages in all industries, and not merely in those directly concerned with exports. If the warnings from the Government mean anything, it is that the maximum standard of wages has now been reached, or even exceeded, and that unless further wage increases are matched by higher productivity, the volume of exports will drop, with disastrous effects upon the economy as a whole.
Road haulage employers may well ponder on the irony of the situation. As their acceptance of the principle that drivers should be well paid becomes more decided, so does their ability to pay higher wages diminish. There is no longer an unlimited kitty from which the unions are entitled to grab as much as they can. If the sum could be calculated, there must be a total wages bill within the capacity of the road haulage industry to pay. The employers' representatives might turn their attention to analysing this omnibus wage packet and determining how, in their.opinion, it could be most fairly split up. In the course of such an investigation, in which for once they would no longer need to be on the defensive. the employers might find material for the intelligible and constructive policy they have lacked in the past.