Political Commentary
Page 54
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Avoiding Complications
By JANUS
WHY the wage scales ot drivers should be negotiated separately with British Road Services and with hauliers under free enterprise has never been completely clear. Some of the reasons are obvious. It is perhaps undignified for a nationalized industry to pay wages under legal compulsion. B.R.S. are part of the Commission, and they have, or would like to have, a common wages policy applicable throughout the
organization. . The fact remains that B.R.S. are a haulage business like any other. Their rates of pay are closely linked with those in the Road Haulage Wages Orders. The same union officials deal with both sections of the employers. Negotiations run on parallel lines, and a change in one section is usually followed by approximately the same change in the other. Any wide disparity would be thought intolerable, but so far as I know it has never been suggested by the trade unions that an increase in railway wages should be copied by B.R.S. or vice versa.
Next Thursday the Road Haulage Wages Council will meet to consider a number of submissions put up by the workers' side. Some of the points will not affect all the workers. There is a proposal to uplift the towns of Worksop and Northallerton from grade 2 to grade 1, and to improve the position of the six-day worker who works on a customary holiday that happens to be a Saturday. The main general request is for an increase in wages and in subsistence allowance. No amount has been named, and the employers' panel will no doubt have to wait until the meeting before they know preciselywhat is wanted.
The employers may be in the mood to question the need for an increase at the present time. The race between wages and prices has lately reached an interesting stage. For over a year the index of retail prices, successor to the old cost-of-living scale, has fluctuated around a point roughly 40% above the index figure in June, 1947, when the new system began. This has enabled the average Wage in industry, which for most of the time has lagged behind, to catch up. Indeed, it as now taken the lead. The wages index in May was 142, and the price index 141.
Defeat Its Own Object During the past 12 months there have been two major rises in the pay of road haulage workers, oat of 3s. last July—when the price index was 141, the same as in May of this year—and the other of 4s. in January. There has been no general increase in road haulage rates, or at least no recommendation to this effect by the Road Haulage Association, since the summer of 1952. Higher wages may make some increase in rates inevitable, and road transport is not the only industry in this dilemma. One of the problems of the Wages Council and of the many other bodies negotiating on wages is to decide whether the grant of more pay will not defeat its own object by causing the price index to start moving upwards again.
Seldom have road haulage operators taken such an interest as now in the wages question. Perhaps the complexity of the wages orders discouraged them. They had become hypnotized by the familiar sequence of an appucation by the unions, discussion by the Wages 1320 Council, and the publication of proposals that inexorably appeared a few weeks later in a different colour as the final statutory order. The rise in wages, like the rise in prices, was something over which the operators appeared to have no control. Few of them had any knowledge of the frequent negoiiations that were taking place on their behalf, and most of them would have failed to name even one of the members of their own panel of the Wages Council. Hauliers generally may have been surprised to receive a request early this year for information about wages paid and hours worked in their business during the previous November. The inquiry was the first of what may become a regular series. Its statistical results have not yet been revealed, but it has certainly made each operator more conscious than before that he has at least a minor role in the activities of the Wages Council. He can see not only that the Council's decisions have an important effect on him but that he may be able to influence the deliberations of the Council.
Intransigent Opponent
Experience seems to show that the more enlightened operator is not necessarily the most intransigent opponent of any improvement in the lot of the workers. It is generally known that the employers' representatives opposed the last increase, and the collection of ammunition for opposing the next was presumably the main
purpose of their inquiry. But whether or not the evidence serves this purpose at this particular time, the growing interest of the employers in wages matters cannot in the long run be a bad thing for the workers.
The Wages Council may have to consider other things besides the actual earnings and hours of work in the road haulage industry. It is unlikely, for instance, that the unions have made their application only to the section under free enterprise. They may even be able to reach agreement with B.R.S. before the Wages Council have come to a decision.
Such an agreement would be an ingenious flanking movement and would put the employers in difficulties. Even if it does not happen this time, the threat is always there. It makes nonsense of the elaborate machinery provided by the Wages Acts.
Not only the haulier is affected by the decisions of the Council. Many C-licence holders adjust their wages in accordance with the wages orders, and most C-licence holders would feel some effect from another increase. They may well be uneasy at the fact that the wages they will have to pay in the future may depend to a large extent upon the result of negotiations between the unions and the B.R.S. The negotiations directly concern less than 50,000 workers, and the number may fall to 5,000 when the programme of disposal is carried out, but the decision may set up a chain reaction affecting possibly another million workers.
Without passing any judgment on the case for more wages, it may be said that the machinery should be simple as well as recognizably fair. Now that workers are passing back to free enterprise and the size of B.R.S. is shrinking, consideration might be given to some method of avoiding the complications caused by separate discussions with the two sections of road haulage. The obvious method would be to bring B.R.S. within the framework of the Wages Council.