Workshop Organisation by G. D. H. Cole

Author:G. D. H. Cole [Cole, G. D. H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social Science
ISBN: 9780429811074
Google: Pqp-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-07T03:40:23+00:00

The Government must take over all the industries and national resources and give organized labour a direct share in the management down through all the departments.

In another part of the issue there is a report of Mr. Lloyd George’s meeting at Parkhead, in the course of which Mr. Kirkwood, one of the leaders who were deported from the Clyde three months later, asked Mr. Lloyd George if he was prepared to give the workers a share in the management of the works.1 It thus appears that the Clyde Workers’ Committee was, at this stage at least, demanding, not exclusive control, but only a share in control on the lines which were urged in the official A.S.E. pamphlet mentioned above. This demand followed naturally upon the actual experience which they had had during the months when the Local Armaments Committees were being used by the Government as agencies for the organization of the munitions industries.

But, whatever the immediate claims put forward by the leaders of the Clyde shop stewards may have been, there is no doubt that, in a remoter sense, they were aiming at a complete transformation of the industrial system, and at the substitution for the capitalist control of industry of a system based on communal control and involving full participation in management by the organized workers. This demand was indeed, even before the war, already coming to be part of the accepted policy of the more advanced sections of the Trade Union movement everywhere, and had been definitely included in the pre-war propaganda of the Metal, Engineering, and Shipbuilding Amalgamation Committee, and of its various local committees. The coming of dilution immediately caused this demand to assume a practical form, and the establishment of the Armaments Committees, the representation accorded to the Trade Unions in the management of certain of the National Factories, and the concessions secured by the shop stewards in certain works as the shortage of skilled labour became acute, all contributed to give precision to what was at first a vague and unformulated aspiration. Mr. Lloyd George need not have professed so much astonishment when the Clyde workers met him with the demand for control; for the demand had been put forward, and fully discussed in the Labour press, for months before his visit.

At this time, however, the Government had set its face resolutely against the experiments in representative government of industry which had been made by a specially created department of the War Office before the Ministry of Munitions took over this part of its work. The whole attitude and tendency of the new ministry was bureaucratic. It was prepared to negotiate nationally, and to enter into national agreements, with the Trade Union leaders; but it was opposed to the creation of local representative machinery, and intent on concentrating authority in the hands of divisional officers appointed from Whitehall and acting under Whitehall’s instructions. The ultra-bureaucratic methods of the Employment Department of the Board of Trade, from which the leading officials on the Labour

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