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Wilson's draconian measures are designed not only to freeze wages and prices but, ironically enough for a Labor government, to create some unemployment. Already the first layoffs from firms cutting back production have begun. The British workingman's reaction is predictable. "It's a shock this comes from a Labor government," says Senior Shop Steward John Recordon of London's Palmer Aero Products. "I can't see any blame for the worker in all this, but now they're going to freeze wages. This talk about workin' harder is a myth. By and large we do our best." Wilson's appeal for Britons to show some of the "Dunkirk spirit" is "so much piffle" to Electroplater Harold Lane. Southampton Dock Leader Trevor Stallard argues that Wilson should have clamped down on profits first, then come to labor for cooperation. "Every time there is a real crisis or an artificial crisis," he says, "the worker rather than the employer classes have to suffer." Shop Steward Tony Bradley, in Morris Motor's Cowley plant, perceptively observes that "the whole trouble with the country is the conservative attitude of the Englishman—manager and worker—who is opposed to change. He lives in a rut, and we are all guilty of it."
For all the resistance to change in work methods by the worker, many an employer is willing to shoulder much of the blame for Britain's plight. "Management is simply not putting enough horsepower at the disposal of its labor force," says Deputy Director General Douglas Taylor of the Confederation of British Industry. Employers have tacitly accepted the rules of the full employment game by hoarding workers that they really do not need against the day they might. Nor is featherbedding unknown in board rooms. In The Suicide of a Nation?, Writer and Critic Goronwy Rees reported attending a regular directors' meeting of an engineering company outside London. "The office was richly furnished with thick carpets, an Annigoni painting, and extremely expensive antique furniture. Deliberations were sweetened by drafts of gin and tonic drunk out of beakers of cut glass. The discussion followed no conceivably rational pattern; a large part of it was taken up by the sales director's amatory reminiscences of the world capitals he had most recently visited. There were frequent interruptions, by telephone, from the directors' wives, who each had various social and domestic problems." Later, Rees recounted, they all adjourned for lunch and large dry martinis at the Dorchester, and at 3:30 returned to their offices, where chauffeur-driven cars waited to whisk them home from the "long, hard day."
"It is beginning to be hinted that we are a nation of amateurs," warned Lord Rosebery in 1900. Even today, British managers are all too often Old Boys, who transfer the notion of the gentleman scholar to their roles as gentlemen businessmen, and work just hard enough to get by. There are perhaps half a million managers in British industry. Few have had any specialized training in management skills—and they are usually proud of it. Business, after all, is not a status occupation in Britain.
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