How Not to Tame a Wildcat

Some 300,000 British railroad workers last week went on slowdown. They not only refused all overtime work but zealously began conforming with all the rigmarole of the 240 regulations in the nationalized British Railways rule book. Guards elaborately checked rail-car doors and couplings, meticulously counted the contents of first-aid kits in locomotives. Engineers took 25-minute tea breaks, stopping many trains on the tracks between stations. Timetables all but vanished in the resulting confusion, and for several days about half the country's passenger trains were delayed or canceled.

Although the unions demand a 9% pay increase as against the railroads' offer of 3%, the heart of the dispute involves a more basic issue. The unions have flatly rejected management's effort to link wage increases to productivity agreements--a step Britain's Labor government calls essential to revive the country's sick economy. Similar labor strife has poisoned industrial relations across the U.K. Most of the jet fleet of British Overseas Airways Corp. lay idle at Heathrow Airport last week because of a strike by 1,050 pilots, who demand that their salaries be doubled to $31,000 a year. BOAC Chairman Sir Giles Guthrie calls the pilots "spoiled children." A three-week-old wildcat strike by 187 female upholstery stitchers has shut down British Ford's huge Dagenham plant, idling 5,000 workers and interrupting the output of autos for the export trade that Britain must increase for its economic survival.

On Its Way. Labor unrest is only one evidence that British complacency has more than survived last fall's devaluation of the pound. Though exports have since climbed by 15%, Britain's promised curb on imports has yet to take effect. May's $206 million trade deficit was just as large as April's. Last week the pound went to a post-devaluation low of $2.3829 on foreign exchange markets. Prime Minister Harold Wilson has so far refused to intervene in the labor disputes, after saying optimistically that "British industry is on its way."

On its way where? Last week, in a 510-page report on the country's economic prospects, an eleven-man team of economists from Washington's Brookings Institution found that British industry is riddled with inefficiency. U.S. factories are rated at 100, said the study, British factories rate only 66 --behind plants in Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, West Germany and France. British executives, said the Brookings report, often "lack breadth as well as technical training," while unions cling to restrictive practices and refuse to tame wild cat strikes.

Powerless Leaders. Of all their labor troubles, wildcat strikes hurt the British the most. Last month a Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers Associations reported that 95% of British strikes are unofficial. The commission found that between 1964 and 1966 there were 2,171 wildcat strikes among the U.K.'s 500 trade unions; they involved 653,400 workers and 1,697,000 lost man-days of work. Over the same period, Britain had only 74 official strikes by 101,100 workers, with 733 000 lost man-days. "Britain is 50 years " behind U.S. the Labor U.S. in labor relations," says U. S. Labor Mediator Theodore W. Kheel, who just returned to Manhattan from a labor relations conference in London. "Any shop steward can call a strike in Britain, and the union's national leadership is powerless to halt it."

Even some labor leaders agree that the problem is serious. "Generally speaking, our industrial relations are almost unbelievably bad," says Lord Delacourt-Smith, general secretary of the Post Office Engineering Union. One key reason is that British unions operate in a legal near-vacuum. They are not bound by agreements they sign, are not liable for authorized acts of their officials. Industry-wide bargaining is al most nonexistent, and there are no provisions for cooling-off periods or court injunctions to stall outrageous strikes. Still, the Royal Commission, which was headed by 70-year-old Lord Donovan, a former leader of the dockworkers, rejected proposed legal curbs on wildcat strikes. And it is fair enough to say that as long as the British labor situation remains the way it is, neither devaluation nor any other remedy will solve the country's economic woes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.