You're Not All Right, Jack

Across Britain last week, the symptoms of what other Europeans call "the English disease" were alarming. In Coventry, 300 deliverymen went on strike for three days. At Ford's Halewood plant. 600 electricians walked out. maintaining the company's five-year average of one walkout a week. In Edinburgh, the Scottish building workers threatened to pull 100,000 men off construction sites.

The constant strikes help explain why, as Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling put it at last week's Tory conference, Britain has "not yet succeeded in achieving an adequate and steady rate of economic growth." His speech was greeted with cries of "Quit dawdling. Maudling!", but a great deal of the dawdling has been done by British labor.

Not Too Fast. To some extent the phenomenon of productivity rising more slowly than wages is an international complaint, but Britain's case is worse than most. No industrial nation in the 1950s had a slower growth of per capita output than Britain--20% for the decade; yet over the same period wages doubled. In West Germany, a comparable wage increase was offset by a 60% rise in productivity. In the face of rugged competition from the Common Market, these figures add up to serious trouble for Britain.

So far this year. Britain has had 2,000-odd strikes that have cost more than 5,000,000 workdays. Many of these were caused by niggling jurisdictional disputes among 650 unions, which range in size from Frank Cousins' mammoth Transport and General Workers Union (1,200,000 members) to shrimps like the National Union of Basket, Cane, Wicker and Fibre

Furniture Makers of Great Britain and Ireland (120). Typical case": f-ofyea-rs"the heating fitters have been feuding with the plumbers, claiming that the plumbers are entitled to lay only cold-water pipes and not hot-water ones too.

Just as serious as strikes are slowdowns, hangovers from the prewar days of heavy unemployment when work was spread thin to make more jobs. Even though today Britain has virtually full employment, there is always the desire to go slow and earn some overtime. The theme song of Peter Sellers' movie satire on trade unions.

I'm, All Right, Jack, aptly capsules this philosophy:

We all pull together, but not too fast.

Got to help the other fellow make the job last.

Lingering Hostility. While workers on the Continent increasingly consider themselves as men on the way up, British workers, thanks in part to stodgy and left-leaning union leadership, are mired in old proletarian cliches. Though Britain's unions are numerically the strongest in Europe--43% of the total working force--they have accomplished far less "leveling"' than advertised. A mere 2% of the population still owns nearly half the wealth, and 81% of the country's wage earners draw $2.800 a year or less before taxes. In straight cash terms, British workers earn the top wages in Europe, but when fringe benefits are figured in, their 96-c- hourly rate trails West Germany's ($1.02 ) and even France's (97-c- ).

Nor have the unions won reasonable seniority or severance-pay provisions for their members, some of whom can be sacked with a couple of hours' notice. The result is a lingering sense of insecurity and a continuing hostility toward employers--the distant ''them'' from whom injustice may be expected as a matter of course. Nowhere is this hostility more obvious than in resistance to automation--a carryover from the Luddites, who ravaged the Midlands in the early 1800s destroying newfangled textile machinery. When London newspapers tried to introduce bundle-tying machines, they found themselves locked in a four-year dispute that ended only when they agreed to keep on all their human bundle-tyers along with the machines.

Growing Disenchantment. In labor's own ranks, some doubts about the unions are appearing. Responsible union leaders oppose wildcat strikes and preach the need for increased productivity. Workers are beginning to have some compunctions about strikes and the pay losses involved, partly because they care more than they used to about material possessions. Today, working-class wives dream not only of washing machines and permanents but also of autos and trips abroad.

As for the public at large, Britons have long been notably calm and patient about strikes. Yet there was some grumbling fortnight ago. when the railwaymen brought trains throughout the country to a dead halt and millions of commuters skipped work rather than try their luck on the highways. Slowly but surely, disenchantment with the unions is growing. In a 1954 Gallup poll, only 12% of the British public considered unions bad--by 1959 the figure had nearly doubled to 23%; Says ..George Woodcock, one of the leaders of the Trades Union Congress: "We have lost the general sympathy that the public usually reserve for the underdog. Trade unions came into existence to resist injustice and oppression. Trade unions should be careful that they do not even appear to be becoming the instruments of oppression themselves."

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