HOW THE TEA BREAK COULD RUIN ENGLAND

THE industrious Englishman has long been getting less so. "I stand by my class," said the workman in Shaw's Major Barbara, "and do as little as I can so's to leave arf the job for me fellow workers." Forty years ago, Dean Inge of St. Paul's had begun to doubt "whether nature intended the Englishman to be a moneymaking animal." Recently, an American efficiency expert took a look at the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and wryly reported that the British work force "takes a substantial part of its wages not in money but in leisure, most particularly in the leisure that is taken at the place of employment." Prime Minister Harold Wilson noted the same thing with a Yorkshireman's economy of speech. "Sheer damn laziness," he said, is Britain's besetting sin, and the nation's need is "a full day's work for a full day's pay."

As the Times of London sadly observes, "a stroll past any building site, a visit to any factory gives the real clue to the country's troubles." One day last week, the sun poked through the haze above Mayfair just after the "elevenses" tea break and just before the lunch break. All work on a Curzon Street building stopped as the construction gang peeled off shirts and spread-eagled across the masonry for a sun tan. On English docks from Liverpool to Southampton, 14-man gangs of stevedores can be found idly following the forklift trucks that replaced them. When a British company proposed to check up on workers who had been out sick more than 25 times a year for three years or more in succession, 500 men indignantly went on strike.

Bunnies in London's Playboy Club are being fired for loafing. Construction workers have been known to take breaks to play soccer in the street. Automobile sheet-metal stampers linger in their locker room calculating the football pools, while the foreman hopefully chants, "Back to the benches, mates." The title of Peter Sellers' 1959 film, I'm All Right, Jack, satirizing the idleness in "the farewell state," has become part of England's language, summing up all the nation's cosseted, truculent, archaic featherbedding.

Smell of Death

On the surface, Britain bustles with the prosperity of bumper-to-bumper traffic and aluminum forests of television antennas; its cultural shock troops of pop art, theater and cinema, the big beat, and Carnaby Street fashions are conquering the world. But underneath, nearly every observant Briton knows that his nation is in serious trouble. One critic has warned that the scepter'd isle seems ready to "sink giggling into the sea." Author Michael Shanks (The Stagnant Society) says that "the hardheaded (and often hardhearted) millowners and steel masters of the North have bred the little flirts of Chelsea and Kensington. It is gay, it is madly amusing, and it carries with it the smell of death." Few would perhaps put Britain's malaise in such harsh terms, but even George Brown, when he was Labor's Economics Minister last May (he has since become Foreign Secretary), said that "fundamental changes are required in the industrial structure of Britain today."

A cold indictment has been drawn by Britain's creditors in the world. For the dozenth time since World War II, London finds itself caught in a cruel balance-of-payments squeeze that threatens the value of the pound and Britain's prosperity. Britain has always had to trade to live on the scale to which it has long been accustomed as a world power--and it has been notably unsuccessful in the postwar era in selling more than it buys abroad. No sooner does the economy get going than imports rise, the balance of payments goes sour, and London must clamp down at home through controls and deflation while it borrows abroad to cover its payments debts in the interim. Such is the "stop-go" method resorted to by Tory and Labor governments alike for 20 years.

This time the stop is so serious that Harold Wilson has taken "steps that have not been taken by any other democratic government in the world," as he told President Johnson. The steps: freezing wages and prices throughout Britain for six months, to be followed by another half-year of "great restraint." The wage freeze is the more important in the gimlet eyes of Britain's foreign creditors, who have put up more than $3 billion to defend the pound. For if Wilson cannot hold down wage increases in a period when his other taxation and monetary measures are taking hold, all credibility in the value of the pound will be undercut; British export costs, swollen by excessive wage gains, will rise, slowing foreign sales of everything from cars and gin to razor blades and woolens. Particularly because his is a Labor government, Wilson's ability to rein in wage demands is almost the litmus test of his ability to set his economy in order.

Beneath the immediate international problem of the payments deficit lies the fact that British productivity lags behind that of Europe or the U.S. From 1960 to 1965, U.S. productivity rose by 21%, West Germany's 29%, Italy's 40%--and Britain's only 18%. For each worker needed to produce a ton of steel in the U.S., three are needed in Britain. In manufacturing, it takes 2.52 Britons to equal the output of one Canadian, 1.89 to equal a Swede's. Yet hourly earnings in British industry grew by 33% in 1960-65--plus another 7% in manufacturing during the first three months of 1966. "More people in Britain pushed up their earnings more steeply for less work than any time since 1960," said the Economist. "Nothing exceeds like excess."

The East-of-Suez Factor

Britain's economic sickness has a long history and many causes. British aid to underdeveloped nations and support for troops in Europe and east of Suez are so large--$1.7 billion a year--that eliminating them would have given Britain a rosy surplus in its balance of payments last year. This is the price Britain has chosen to pay to remain one of the world's major powers--a role that many critics argue she can no longer afford. Largely for the same status reasons, London upholds sterling as an international reserve currency financing 40% of world trade, second only to the dollar.

Internally, the reluctance of the British worker to work while demanding ever higher pay is hardly the whole problem. British management quite blithely suffers labor to indulge in excess, in part because Britain has been chronically short of workers. Neither management nor government has directed enough investment or the right kind of investment into British industry. And no postwar government has risked a telling measure of unemployment long enough to lubricate the labor market, or created the kind of incentives needed to boost exports consistently. London has ignored Ralph Waldo Emerson's dictum that "governments of nations of shopkeepers must keep shop also."

Still, it is the attitude and work habits of the British worker that are on trial in the present crisis. For one thing, the National Union of Seamen last May and June precipitated the current payments crisis with a costly 45-day strike that prevented British exports from leaving port, while winning a 5% wage gain (atop a 9% boost last year) that destroyed Wilson's 3.5% wage-increase guideline. When Wilson pleaded that the walkout was "endangering the welfare of the nation," Seamen's Union Leader Bill Hogarth made a we're-all-right reply: "If we were thinking of our country first and foremost, there would be no strike. But charity begins at home." Thus the battle to save Britain's economy is turning into a test of wills between Wilson's Labor government and the workingman. Frank Cousins resigned as Minister of Technology when Wilson decided on his wage freeze, and has gone back to his secretary-generalship of the 1,500,000-member Transport and General Workers' Union to spearhead defiance of the freeze.

Already other unions have indicated that they may join the T.G.W.U., Britain's largest union, setting the stage for fresh industrial chaos if Wilson tries to enforce the freeze --and perhaps bringing on the collapse of the pound if Britain's creditors become convinced he cannot. That would mean the devaluation of sterling, upsetting world trade and money markets--and few British politicians believe Wilson could survive a devaluation. That labor unions might defy a Labor government to the point of dismantlement seems puzzlingly Procrustean indeed. Why, then, does labor resist?

Maginot Outlook

There are 25 million wage earners in Britain, nearly 9,000,000 of whom are "blue-collar blokes." Most have been working-class for generations, lineal heirs of the men who in the last century fought all the first battles for the world's new breed of industrial worker.

Today the lot of the "blokes" has improved immeasurably. The British blue-collar man earns an average of $52 a week, is enveloped in the blanket of welfare-state comforts from cradle to grave. A third of workers own their own homes and cars, 80% have a television set, 50% a washing machine, 25% a phone. On an average, each laborer drinks 225 pints of beer a year. Nonetheless, recollections die hard of the harsh days when a future Poet Laureate of England, John Masefield, could write:

Better a brutal starving nation

Than men with thoughts above their station.

History matters in Britain's present attitudes toward work. "Workingmen," says London School of Economics Professor Richard Titmuss, "carry with them a folk memory." The memory is of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six Dorsetshire farm laborers who in 1834 were transported to the penal colony at Australia's Botany Bay for attempting to form a trade union. The memory includes the General Strike of 1926, the massive unemployment of the Great Depression, the perennial pain of class distinctions, the furious battles to gain labor's rights. It has left British labor with what Labor Journalist John Cole calls a "Maginot outlook," in which strikes are called not so much for higher wages as for preserving some time-honored way of doing a job. A belligerent sense of "them" and "us" still pervades any dispute. "The employing class," as the Amalgamated Engineering Union's initiation rites still assert, has "persecuted, victimized, and always opposed improved labor conditions." And, indeed, to rise from the working class to the managing class is still almost unthinkable in Britain.

With a historical chip of this weight on the workingman's shoulder, it is hardly surprising that strikes have erupted because a foreman used a four-letter word in addressing workers, because the tea was not made exactly to the employees' liking, because the number of sausages in factory-canteen sandwiches was cut from two to one, or because three brewery workers were fired for guzzling more than their traditional two free pints of beer on the job. A Bristol shipyard was struck for three weeks when boilermakers and shipwrights clashed over who should trace a pencil line around a plastic pattern. Almost every skilled craft worker in Britain still demands and gets a "mate" to carry his tools and do his lifting and fetching for him--a medieval hangover from the guild apprentice system. A Vickers' shipyard, for example, has an electrician who earns $56 a week chiefly for replacing about 30 light bulbs a day in the sockets of portable lights. He has an assistant who earns $40 a week for handing him the bulbs.

Wilson's draconian measures are designed not only to freeze wages and prices but, ironically enough for a Labor government, to create some unemployment. Already the first layoffs from firms cutting back production have begun. The British workingman's reaction is predictable. "It's a shock this comes from a Labor government," says Senior Shop Steward John Recordon of London's Palmer Aero Products. "I can't see any blame for the worker in all this, but now they're going to freeze wages. This talk about workin' harder is a myth. By and large we do our best." Wilson's appeal for Britons to show some of the "Dunkirk spirit" is "so much piffle" to Electroplater Harold Lane. Southampton Dock Leader Trevor Stallard argues that Wilson should have clamped down on profits first, then come to labor for cooperation. "Every time there is a real crisis or an artificial crisis," he says, "the worker rather than the employer classes have to suffer." Shop Steward Tony Bradley, in Morris Motor's Cowley plant, perceptively observes that "the whole trouble with the country is the conservative attitude of the Englishman--manager and worker--who is opposed to change. He lives in a rut, and we are all guilty of it."

For all the resistance to change in work methods by the worker, many an employer is willing to shoulder much of the blame for Britain's plight. "Management is simply not putting enough horsepower at the disposal of its labor force," says Deputy Director General Douglas Taylor of the Confederation of British Industry. Employers have tacitly accepted the rules of the full employment game by hoarding workers that they really do not need against the day they might. Nor is featherbedding unknown in board rooms. In The Suicide of a Nation?, Writer and Critic Goronwy Rees reported attending a regular directors' meeting of an engineering company outside London. "The office was richly furnished with thick carpets, an Annigoni painting, and extremely expensive antique furniture. Deliberations were sweetened by drafts of gin and tonic drunk out of beakers of cut glass. The discussion followed no conceivably rational pattern; a large part of it was taken up by the sales director's amatory reminiscences of the world capitals he had most recently visited. There were frequent interruptions, by telephone, from the directors' wives, who each had various social and domestic problems." Later, Rees recounted, they all adjourned for lunch and large dry martinis at the Dorchester, and at 3:30 returned to their offices, where chauffeur-driven cars waited to whisk them home from the "long, hard day."

"It is beginning to be hinted that we are a nation of amateurs," warned Lord Rosebery in 1900. Even today, British managers are all too often Old Boys, who transfer the notion of the gentleman scholar to their roles as gentlemen businessmen, and work just hard enough to get by. There are perhaps half a million managers in British industry. Few have had any specialized training in management skills--and they are usually proud of it. Business, after all, is not a status occupation in Britain.

Another Sweden?

The tradition of the amateur has other far-reaching effects on Britain's ability to compete in the world today, suggests the Royal Institute of International Affairs' Andrew Shon-field. "Upper-class manners--and it is these manners which set the tone for the whole community in Britain--are unsympathetic to the crudity and explicitness of performance." The result affects everything from the quality of technical education to precise manufacturing standards, and helps explain why the atavistic apprentice system persists, with its "myth of the craftsman and his incommunicable skills." Arthur Koestler agrees that "psychological factors and cultural attitudes are at the root of Britain's economic evils."

Archaic work attitudes, ingrained class divisions, the tolerance of amateurism and inefficiency, governments unable or unwilling to keep shop--the list of Britain's ills goes on and on. Britain, which once ruled the world, now commands admiration for the poignant knack of "muddling through." In the current crisis the British may, or may not, muddle through again. But simply surviving it like all the previous ones, without effecting a revision from top to bottom of Britain's approach to the business of earning its way in the world, would be a hollow victory. Better perhaps would be a defeat and devaluation that might force the surgery of fundamental change. As the British know better than anyone else, somehow the way to a second Industrial Revolution must be found. The alternative is to sink slowly toward the status of Sweden--prosperous and placid perhaps, but hardly the England that was.

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