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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.