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Mobility of labour
“Then I propose, in order to cater for the mobility of labor, to arrange a transfer scheme through the local bodies and the divisional controllers, first utilizing the grouping in a limited area. For instance, to illustrate my point, the other night I was approached and told that work was held up for want of fitters in the Rolls Royce plant at Crewe. I found that a lot of argument had been going round on this, and I got on the telephone with the Railway Executive and the Unions and in less than half an hour the requisite number of fitters was transferred from the L. M. S. Railway to Rolls Royce, and a whole chain of production was released in a few minutes in consequence.
“With the Production Council in being, if you take a place like Derby, I can say, ‘Can you slow down on railway work for a week or a few days, and let me release the block that has arisen in one of the other works in the district?’ and in that way I can avoid the disturbance of the people’s homes and all this traveling about the country which is so silly. In air attack of this kind I have to have regard to the fact that I have the women and the children to look after who are subconsciously going through a very nervous strain the whole time; and the less disturbance I can create the better I shall be pleased.
“But I shall have to move people; it may be I shall have to move miners if a mine gets blown up, or it may be I shall have to move aircraft people, or it may be I shall have to move people in order to increase the production here or there due to the strategy of the war. This presents a very difficult problem, and I have decided that I will pay a lodging allowance in every case where a man can show that he is keeping two homes. That is to say, if a man has a home to keep and then is removed to another job which involves him in the cost of lodgings, I would pay the lodging allowance. But in the case of single men or men with no liability of that sort, where it is just a case of putting your hat on and leaving your lodgings and going to another town, I am not prepared to undertake to pay a lodging allowance, and I do not think you would ask me to do it. I pay this lodging allowance in order not to upset the wage arrangement. And in order that there shall be no percentage charged on it anywhere, I propose to pay the lodging allowance through the Employment Exchange so that it is only the lodging allowance I pay and nothing more. I think you will agree that this is better finance than the spiral.
“I have had a great worry. I knew I had to come and ask you to break your rules, and work overtime. Here let me say in passing that the nation and the boys at the front are indebted to you for what you have done. We have not removed all the bottle-necks yet, but I can assure you the most drastic action is being taken to remove any hindrance as fast as we can, and if we find a management or a director or somebody else with their funny little ways standing in the way of turning the stuff out, I feel happy now—as you will realize—that I can assist in sacking the boss. Many a time I have felt like it. Therefore, if there is anything standing in the way, be sure to let us know. You ought to do all you can to see there is no hindrance put in the way of production.
“But I was worried as to how I could see it all restored. The one way and the only way I could think of effectively doing that was to add a clause to the Fair Wage Resolution permanently, under which no person either serving the Government or in a Government factory or contracting for the Government shall be entitled to a single order where the Trade Unions can show their position is not properly restored. I emphasize that point. I told the employers that my colleagues would agree quite frankly that if the Trade Unions gave anything up, they and they alone were the people to say it should be restored, and it was not a question of argument afterwards. I said: ‘You will settle your problem of compensation with the Treasury. You will settle your problem of management. That is your business. But what I am asking is that if the workman has to give up something that is his, he is the man to determine that it shall be given back.’ I stand on that four-square, and so does the whole Government. You are entitled to ask us for that. I could not think of a better device than framing a Fair Wage Clause, because at the end of this war I am convinced, even when we are victorious—which in spite of the black hour, we are going to be—when aggression is stopped, there will be a tremendous task to reconstruct this country. Big business has failed. I have often said on the platform that the test of any institution is not what it can do in peace, but can it see the State through in a crisis? If it cannot, it is a failure. That, after all, is what is facing us as the British Trade Union Movement today.
“Lastly, I have to ask you virtually to place yourselves at the disposal of the State. We are Socialists, and this is the test of our Socialism. It is the test whether we have meant the resolutions which we have so often passed. I do not want you to get worried too much about every individual that may be in the Government. We could not stop to have an election; we could not stop to decide the issue. But this I am convinced of: if our Movement and our class rise with all their energy now and save the people of this country from disaster, the country will always turn with confidence forever to the people who saved them. They will pay more attention to an act of that kind than to theoretical arguments or any particular philosophy. And the people are conscious at this moment that they are in danger.
“We are in this job to win this war, to save our own homes and our own people. I am asking you for sacrifice. I will do my best, and the Government will do its best, to restore it to you afterwards. When this victory is complete, it is my Department that will deal with it, and I want to stay there until it is through if I can, for that one reason. I want no higher office, or other place. Having put my hand to the plow I do not want to turn back, or shift anywhere else, because at the end it will be this Department that will deal with the International Labor Office; it is this Department that is responsible for international labor. In the same spirit that I am trying to find a different equilibrium for the countryside, so I want, if God spares me, to play a part in the end in trying to put international labor on terms of equality for everybody throughout the world.”