MPs committee attacks the Dock Labour Scheme

Fill in the form below and send to NATIONAL SECRETARY, SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE, 186A CLAPHAM HIGH ST, LONDON, SW4 7UG. Our Industrial Correspondent HULL dockers' jobs, working conditions and wages are all seriously threatened by the report of a House Commons watchdog committee published yesterday.

The Select Committee on Nationalized Industries has been investigating the running of the British Transport Docks Board, which controls 19 ports including Southampton, Hull, Newport and Garston.

Disappointment It says that Hull, whose deficit worsened from £800,000 to nearly flm last year, is the Board's major disappointment. And it recommends that troubles in the working of the 1947 Dock Labour Scheme there should receive urgent, top-level government attention.

The report will clearly fit neatly into the port employers' strategy for using the present jobs crisis in the ports to attack the Scheme, which gives dockers at least a partial statutory title to their jobs.

Its timing is surely not accidental. With the Jones-Aldington report on the port jobs issue due in just a few days' time, its conclusions are assured of maximum publicity.

Chief among these is the idea that there are 500 more dockers at Hull than are needed.

There are currently 2,800 registered dockers in the port. The committee is thus as good as recommending an 18 per cent redundancy.

It is here that the attack on working conditions and wages comes in.

The situation at Hull is exacerbated, the report says, 'by the failure of the local Dock Labour Board to allow the excess labour to be put on the temporarily unattached register. This would at least halve the unnecessary extra cost.

'At a port like Hull, already losing part of its traditional trade for reasons outside its control, the increase in costs arising from overmanning in slack times and the refusal to operate a supplementary list in busy times serve to drive away yet more trade to other ports or to private wharves outside the scope of the Dock Labour Scheme.

With one indiscriminate sweep, the MPs who staff the Select Committee are here obviously calling into question the principle of joint union-employer control of the Dock Labour Scheme and proposing a cut in the pay of hundreds of men.

They are also opening door for a return of the bad old days of casual labour before Scheme came in in 1947.

The dockers fought hard to escape from these conditions. They are not about to return to them on the say-so of a bunch of Westminster MPs.

(The report betrays considerable ignorance about the working of the Dock Labour Scheme. The purpose of the temporarily unattached register, for instance, is not to provide employers with a 'supplementary list' of dockers available to their every whim, but to alleviate hardships caused by short-term fluctuations in the trading situation.)

The Select Committee goes on to praise the success of Southampton, which last year improved from a deficit of €900,000 surplus of £500,000.

Success there encouraged good industrial relations, the report says. Good industrial relations assured a reliable service which, in turn, bred more trade.

Loss of trade at Hull, it says in contrast, accentuated the need to reduce the numbers employed.

This led to a bad state in labour relations. In turn, this had led to increased handling costs and loss of reliability of service, losing the port more trade.

Attack The report says: "The solution may be to take Humberside and the labour force as a whole and to concentrate on developing facilities where conditions are most favourable.

"The local patriotism found in the ports must accept larger loyalties?

This last is entirely in line with the plans of many port emSubscribe!

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Days required (Please tick Or Full stio AMI DDI AmoI out a subscription MONDAY TUESDAY Ont e closed E ployers, haulage operators and warehousing firms, who have been busily developing private berths along the river where they use non-Scheme labour at much lower rates of pay than the dockers command.

As such it represents yet another attack by the Select Committee on the Scheme.

Among the report's recommendations is a suggestion that the British Transport Docks Board should operate (for a management fee ports with no real prospect of solvency, but which are needed in the national interest.

To some extent, there are similarities here with the recently-legislated Harbours (Loans)

This provides for loans to port authorities which are experiencing financial difficulties, as a result of high capital costs or other causes. These are to be administered under stringent controls over the authorities' policies, including their labour policies, by the National Ports Council.

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