STRIKE OF THE LONDON SHIPWRIGHTS.

Press, Volume XI, Issue 1373, 2 April 1867, Page 3

STRIKE OF THE LONDON SHIPWRIGHTS.

[From the " Saturday Review," January 26.] The shipwrights of the port of London have chosen rather to decline work altogether than, to take it at a reduced rate of wages. Tbe case as put by Mr Ford, the Managing Director of the Thames Ironworks Shipbuilding, Engineering, and Dry Docks Company, amounts to this. The Company has suffered, in common with other employers, from the prevailing slackness of trade, but it has hitherto been able to keep 2000 men at work, though even this is considerably less than half the number usually engaged. The approaching completion of several large contracts will necessitate the discharge of some hundreds of these hands; and, under these circumstances, the Directors have been in treaty for the construction of certain foreign steamers. The price at which this order can be obtained makes it impossible to execute it at the present cost of labor except at a positive loss ; and the Directors have accordingly proposed to keep on their men for this especial job at the rate of Gs 6d per day, instead of 7s. This offer the shipwrights have refused, and the contracts will in consequence have to be given up. Such, we say, is the case as stated by the masters to the public, and, we presume, as laid by them before the men ; and the first point to be noticed is that the men's answer does not raise any question as to the truth of the alleged facts. It has not, so far as we know, been denied that the Company could not accept the contracts in question without loss if they had to pay the shipwrights 7s a day. The latter carefully limit themselves in their reply to a statement that their present wages are not in excess of their requirements. They say, in fact, that their expenses have been calculated on the higher scale, and that they cannot lower that scale without doing injustice to themselves and their families. They claim, that is to say, a species of miraculous immunity from the general depression by which all around them are affected. They adopt the public, as opposed to the private, method of striking a balance-sheet : they draw out their estimates first, and then consider the ways and means of providing for them. The peculiar circumstances under which this refusal has been made invest it with unusual importance. In most similar cases, the workmen concerned have only to consider the interests of their own trade, and so long as they do not attempt to control the conduct of those of their body who think differently, they have a right to their own opinion, even though it may be materially erroneous. But in the present instance there are moral considerations involved, the weight of which it requires no special professional knowledge to estimate. We will assume that the men who have thus declined 6s 6d a day are certain of being able to maintain themselves during the period of their voluntary inactivity, either from their own past earnings, or more probably, from the reserve fund of the Trade Union of which they are members. It is inconceivable that they should nourish any idea of assistance from an almost exhausted poor-rate, or from the uncertain and intermittent stream of private charity. Both these sources of support are already taxed far beyond their strength to supply the urgent wants of men with whom idleness is a matter of imperious necessity, not of politic calculation or trade usage; and for any man to come upon these funds, so long as he could maintain himself and his family by taking work at a reduced rate of payment, would argue a'want of self-respect, and a wilful preference of the supposed interests of his particular employment over the obvious needs of his class at large, which we should be sorry to attribute to any English workman. But even after we have given the shipwrights full credit on this score, there are still grounds enough in existence on which to found a judgment against them. In the first place, their act tends directly to divert the funds on which they must depend for subsistence from other and more legitimate uses. We have seen that this very company which was willing to pay 6s 6d a day is only able to find work, even at that reduced figure for less than half its usual workmen. By this reckoning we have upwards of 2000 unemployed hands to be maintained whose need is in no way whatever of their own creating. It is these latter who have, morally speaking, a paramount claim upon the resources of the Trade Societies, and every additional burden cast upon these organizations must inevitably subject their reserved store to present stress and speedy exhaustion. The direct consequence, therefore, of this step taken by the shipwrights is to diminish the fund which supports those of their fellows who are unable to get work simply because there is none to be had. Nor does it dimmish this fund only by exposing it to a more rapid drain. The capital of a Trade Society is exclusively maintained by the contributions of those of its members who are at work; and every additional man who ceases to be in the receipt of wages counts for so much a week less on the credit side of the account, as well as for so much a week more on the debit side. And besides this, no man probably is allowed to draw, except for a very short period, anything like the sum which he can make while fully employed. At an ordinary time this fact is only important to himself and his family, but at an exceptions time like the present it concerns others as well. A suddenly contracted expenditure on the part of the workmen in the East of London means suddenly contracted receipts on the part of the struggling and hard-pressed tradesmen from whom he buys the

necessary articles of food and clothing. It is a pity that the writers of the letter to Mr Ford had not called this fact to mind before they spoke of " doing injustice to all those with whom they have dealings," by accepting a reduction of 6d a day. If they had done so, it might have struck them that, so far as their tradesmen were concerned, it would be a worse injustice still to accept the greater reduction which will be necessitated by the substitution of the Trade Union for the Company as their weekly paymaster. Nor must it be forgotten that the shipwrights stand to a large body of laborers somewhat in the relation in which the electors in each constituency stand to the non-electors. The latter are held in theory to be represented, sufficiently for the purposes of the Constitution, in the persons of those who have votes ; and in like manner the skilled workmen who are represented in each Trade Union are bound to take some thought t for that dumb mass of unskilled labor which practically lies at their mercy, and suffers from their acts. For the last two months, we are told, at least 20,000 dock laborers have not earned a shilling. In a class which even in prosperous times finds it hard enough to live, we can easily understand what a J fact like this amounts to; and yet, in the face of circumstances such as these, the London shipwrights, taking advantage of their exceptional position as the keystone of the whole circle of shipbuilding labor, have deliberately called off their men, and thereby reduced some additional hundreds or thousands to the same pitch of destitution. There is but one possihle answer to these charges. It must be shown, if the workmen wish to justify themselves in any even the smallest degree, that the case which Mr Ford has put is absolutely false; that the foreign contracts, even at the old scale of wages, would have yielded a fair profit to the Company ; and that the proposition of the directors, instead of being designed for the benefit of their bands, was intended to entrap them by the prospect of immediate destitution into selling their labor for less than its fair value in the open market. If the shipwrights can establish such a position as this, they will have the right to have the case reheard. If they cannot, the mere statement of what they have done must carry their condemnation with it.