No Settlement Yet on Provincial Claims
Page 42
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
FROM OUR INDUSTRIAL CORRESPONDENT
N. agreement has been reached yet in the three-poInt claim for higher pay, shorter hours and longer holidays for 70,000 municipal busmen. The Wages Committee of the National Joint Council for Road Passenger Transport, to which it had been referred, failed last week to come to any decision.
The ineet:ng was largely taken up hy further arguments by the trade union side in support of the claim. They drew attention to other recent pay settlements. not least the interim pay rises awarded to the London busmen as a result of the first report of the Phelps Brown Committee of Inquiry. These will now be considered by the employers.
The Committee was due to meet again today (Friday) to continue the discussion. The feeling at the end of last week's session was that they were hopeful that some sort of aereement would result at the next meeting, which they could submit as a joint recommendation to the next meeting of the full Council next Thursday.
Although they will continue to press hard for a rise no less than that given to the London men—ranging up to 15s. a week—the feeling on the union side is that they may have to agree to another widening of the differentials.
• In the parallel claim on behalf af 100,000 company busmen the employers' side of the National Council for the omnibus industry agreed in London this week that there was a case to consider. When the claim was first submitted last November, they rejected it outright.
Further evidence in support of the claim is to be submitted by the six unions on a date still to be fixed. Mr. Sam Henderson, national passenger group secretary of the T.G.W.U., on behalf f the unions, drew attention to other pay settlements since last October including those to road haulage workers, the London busmen, engineers and railwaymen. He argued that there was now a wide disparity between busmens' rates in the provinces and those of other workers. He thought that the increases in outside industry had averaged between five and six per cent.
lie also referred to the interim pay settlement for London busmen and maintained that the Court of Inquiry finding that London busmen were underpaid supported his contention that the provincial busmen were in an even worse position. The differential between London busmen and their colleagues in the provinces of between 20s. and 30s. a week had been widened still further. That must he corrected, he argued.
Pressure by rank and file busmen in support of the claim has been growing meanwhile. Apart from the Midland Red busmens' decision to stage a one-day token strike next Saturday (see story on this page), other company busmen have also threatened token stoppages, bans on overtime and work-to-rule.