Peace Treaty

Or "a boneless wonder"

The labor unrest that has been bedeviling Britain continued to possess the country last week. Highways remained glazed with snow because striking maintenance men refused to sand or plow them. Soaring Everests of garbage piled up in London streets as a walkout of refuse collectors entered a sixth week, and sporadic work stoppages there and in other cities by public employees fouled up the operations of hospitals and schools. Thus even though the public workers' walkout finally seemed headed toward a settlement, there was an air of desperation about Labor Prime Minister James Callaghan when he appeared in Parliament. Waving a new 19-page peace treaty with his Labor government's once strongest backer, the powerful Trades Union Congress (T.U.C.), Callaghan declared: "We stand by this document, and we will win the election with it."

So he hopes. Callaghan's clumsy handling of the unions' disruptive winter offensive has dissipated the firm lead his party had run up over the Conservative opposition by the end of last year. A poll released last week by London's well-regarded Market and Opinion Research Institute showed that the Tories had leaped ahead of Labor by an impressive 55% to 36% and that for the first time ever Conservative Leader Margaret Thatcher had surpassed Callaghan in personal popularity 44% to 33%.

Callaghan's new concordat replaces the three-year-old so-called social contract under which the T.U.C. had agreed to temper wage demands to tamp down Britain's virulent inflation. Now that the rate has been hammered down to about 9%, a third of what it was in 1975, the restless unions are less inclined to show restraint. And indeed, instead of a firm wage lid, Callaghan's new pact contains only some vague appeals.

The pact is aimed at increasing the national output by 3% while simultaneously reducing inflation to under 5% by 1982. The government, the unions and management are supposed to achieve this by conducting a joint annual review of economic conditions to help keep wage settlements within realistic bounds. The concordat would do little to curb the union tactic that galls Britons most: secondary picketing. This is what the country's 80,000 striking truck drivers used to shut down factories all over the country while they negotiated their guideline-busting 21% pay hike last month. Though a recent poll showed that 89% of the public (including 86% of trade union members) wanted this practice outlawed, the pact merely calls on the T.U.C. to control it.

Callaghan hopes that his concordat will buy enough time to allow the current union fever to subside before he has to face another election, which must be held by Nov. 20. But the opposition has no intention of letting Callaghan set his own political timetable. Some important tests of the Labor government's leverage with the unions will come in March, when contracts expire for both the coal miners and power station employees. "Mighty Maggie" Thatcher, who dismisses Callaghan's concordat as "a boneless wonder," might well decide that the timing will be right next month to force a vote of confidence on Labor's policies. qed

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