INDUSTRIAL COUNCILS.

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 36, 10 August 1918, Page 12

INDUSTRIAL COUNCILS.

The establishment of Industrial Councils received some prominence in the report adopted by the open conference which considered the question of industrial conscription. This is following a plan outlined in the famous Whitley report, which, no doubt, will figure largely in the reconstruction problems .which will have to be faced after the war. The primary objects of industrial councils, according .to the British plan, is to regularise the relations between employers and employed. But they will servo another need, and in doing so vill give the work-people a status in their respective industries' that they have not had hitherto. The British Ministry of Labour recently . issued a pamphlet, in which the need for industrial councils was discussed at length. The pamphlet slates that 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 wished to ascertain the needs and opinions of. an industry, instead of one organisation speaking with a single voice, a dozen organisations spoke with a dozen voices. "The different sections and interests are organised and can put their point of view; the industry as a whole has no representative organisation, so the general interest of the industry *may be overlooked. Sectional interests often conflict; there ie no need, for example, to disguise the conflict of interests between employers and employed; and the Whitley report proposes nothing in the nature of compulsory organisation, nothing that will limit or interfere with the right to lock-out, or' strike. But no one in industry wahts an unnecessary stoppage; these can be prevented only by representatives of conflicting interests meeting to thresh out their differences; and all the problems that will face industry after the war call for continuous consultation and co-opera-tion 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."