tries the Ministry of Labour is giving assistance in setting up councils. The government have approved a scheme dealing with the application of the Whitley report to the industrial establishment of the government, and immediate steps are being taken to place the scheme before the trade unions and departments concerned. A subcommittee of the interdepartmental committee on the application of the Whitley Report to government establishments is considering the question of its application to the clerical and administrative classes of the civil service. Arrangements have been made for hearing evidence from representatives of civil service associations. An official leaflet has recently 'been issued entitled "Industrial Councils: The Recommendations of the Whitley Report," which gives an outline of the principal recommendations of the report, in order that they may be made as widely known as possible among the members of employers' and workpeople's associations. The sections of the leaflet dealing with "Industrial Councils and the Government" and "The Need for Industrial Councils" are as follows: Industrial Councils and the Government The primary object of Industrial Councils then is to regularize the relations between employers and employed. But they will serve another urgent need and, in so doing, will give to workpeople a status in their respective industries that they have not had hitherto. There is a large body of problems which belong both to industry and to politics. They belong to politics, because the community is responsible for their solution and the state must act as if no other provision is made; they belong to industry, because they can be solved only by the knowledge and experience of the people actually engaged in industry. Such problems are the regularization of employment, industrial training, utilization of inventions, industrial research, the improvement of designs and quality, legislation affecting workshop conditions-all of them questions which have hitherto been left in the main to employers, but which in reality constitute an important common interest on the basis of which all engaged in an industry can meet. The termination of the war will bring with it a mass of new problems of this nature; for example, demobilization, the training of apprentices whose apprenticeship was interrupted by military service, the settlement in industry of partially disabled men, and, in general, the reconversion of industry to the purposes of peace. It is urgently necessary that the government should be able to obtain without delay the experience and views of the people actually in industry on all these questions. It proposes, therefore, to treat Industrial Councils as Standing Consultative Committees to the government and the normal channel through which it will seek the experience and advice of industries. Further, many of these problems can be handled by each industry by itself, provided that it has an organization representative of all sections and interests within it. The establishment of Industrial Councils will, therefore, make unnecessary a large amount of "government interference,' which is at present unavoidable, and substitute for it a real measure of "self-government" in industry. The Need for Industrial Councils While there is no doubt that every industry has problems which can be solved only if the experience of every grade and section of the industry is brought to bear on them, hitherto the tendency has been for every grade and section to go its own way. Whenever the government wishes to ascertain the needs and opinions of an industry, instead of one organization speaking with a single voice, a dozen organizations speak with a dozen voices. The different sections and interests are organized and can put their point of view; the industry as a whole has no representative organization, so that the general interest of the industry may be overlooked. Sectional interests often conflict; there is no need for example to disguise the conflict of interests between employers and employed; and the Whitley Report proposes nothing of the nature of compulsory arbitration, nothing that will limit or interfere with the right to lockout or strike. But no one in industry wants an unnecessary stoppage; these can be prevented only by the representatives of conflicting interests meeting to thrash out their differences; and all the problems that will face industry after the war call for continuous consultation and coöperation of all sections, grades, and interests. For every reason, therefore, industrial councils, fully representative of all sections and interests in each industry, are an urgent necessity. In some industries there exist already joint conciliation boards performing some of the functions of industrial councils. These are, however, as a rule, limited either in the work they undertake or in the sections of the industry which they represent. Although, therefore, existing joint boards will in many cases provide the basis for industrial councils, they cannot handle the problems, referred to above, with which the industries of the country will be faced after the war. What is needed is an organization representing the whole industry and capable of speaking for all the firms and all the workpeople employed in it. The government's adoption of the Whitley Report is simply an invitation to the industries of the country to organize themselves in this way, for their own benefit and for the benefit of the community. To summarize Part IV: we have shown the movement toward workers' control manifested in spontaneous action by the workers themselves through the shop stewards, the railwaymen, the miners, the higher officials of the engineers, and others. We have shown it furthered by progressive employers, such as Renold, and Rown tree. We have shown the government promoting it in the controlled munitions factories, in the civil service and through the Whitley Reports. It remains to be brought out that the area over which these going experiments operate is the area of workshop and factory conditions and processes. But the area of production is vastly wider than this. The democratic government of the factory is not selfgovernment in industry. It is a first step. British industrial history of the next fifty years will be concerned with larger applications. The control of workshop conditions and processes is not control of the product. As Cole says: Capitalist control of the product has three principal aspects. It is expressed in the financial system by which the great investors and syndicates regulate the flow of capital; in the control of raw materials-buying, and in the trol of the finished product-selling. As a war measure the ontrol Board in the Woollen and Worsted Industries determined the allocation of the wool available for the civilian trade, and regulated the hours and conditions of working. This Board of Control consisted of thirty-three members, eleven nominated by the War Office, eleven by the employers' associations, eleven by the trade unions. An Order in Council defined the powers of the board. Thus the distribution of raw material as well as labor conditions passed under collective democratic control. A loosely organized private industry has been lifted to the level of a responsible national service under the mutual economic government of employers, employees and the public. In the spring of 1918, Dr. Addison (then Minister of Reconstruction) called a meeting of Associations of Employers and Trade Unions in the saddlery, harness and equipment, light leather goods, and belting industries. He said he wished to receive suggestions for "a joint council about raw material requirements." The Cotton Control Board in Lancashire has 21 members, representing the spinners and manufacturers, cotton associations, a Chamber of Commerce, the Board of Trade, and the trade unions. It has power to fix the price daily. George A. Greenwood in the English World's Work for December, 1918, says that these woollen and cotton boards show that the government may claim as a function the protection of the larger mass of consumers from either cornering or profiteering on the part of the smaller body of producers. Employers, guaranteed their fair share of raw material, may be told at what they must sell. Not less important is the establishment in practice of the right of the trade unions to a voice in the control of industry. The Ministry of Labour states that one of the questions where the government will need the united and considered opinion of each large industry (management and workers) is the control of raw materials. The councils will be recognized as the official standing consultative committees to the government. It is intended that industrial councils should play a definite and permanent part in the economic life of the country. Thus the area of self-government in industry widens. The old order of autocratic management is passing. The new order of industrial democracy begins slowly, painfully, to be established. The forces at work at the elbow of every British wage earner are now before us; forces which reacted cumulatively upon the war time development of the political labor movement (as interpreted in Part III); and impelled both the economic and political arms of the movement-the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party -to claim a hearing for the workers in war and in peace and to reach out toward corresponding groups in other countries (as interpreted in Parts I and II). In Part V, we shall follow these various strands of interest throughout 1918-economic, political, inter-Allied, international-and endeavor to throw light on the relation borne toward them by American labor and the American Republic, both of which might be presupposed to be sympathetic toward the struggle for democracy of the mother country at home as well as in the field. |