Essay: HOW THE TEA BREAK COULD RUIN ENGLAND

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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.

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