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Trade Union Policy Under Full Employment*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Eugene Forsey
Eugene Forsey*
Affiliation:
Canadian Congress of Labour, Ottawa
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Extract

I do not propose to discuss here the problems of the transition from war to peace, or how unions can help to get full employment in the first place. I am concerned with the more fundamental problem of the place of unions in a society which has achieved full employment in peace-time, without sacrificing any of the essential freedoms, and which wants to keep both full employment and freedom. I am assuming that full employment involves planning. I am assuming also that unions are not just nuisances but, in one form or another, permanent and desirable social institutions. Can we plan production without planning wages, hours, and conditions of work? If full employment involves planning these also, where do the unions come in ? Must they sacrifice their traditional freedom to bargain collectively on behalf of their members, and suffer a sea-change into something, if not rich and strange, at least very different from what they have ever been before? Or can the community do this part of its planning through collective bargaining? Can we continue to have purely sectional bargaining, plant by plant, industry by industry, or must the various unions act as a unit according to a general wage policy laid down by some central organization? Must trade unionism change its functions, or its structure, or both?

These questions have been widely discussed in Britain, and to some extent also in the United States; in Canada, as far as I know, hardly at all. If we mean business when we talk of full employment, especially full employment in a free society, it is high time they were. For they are not by any means minor questions. Mrs. Wootton goes so far as to say that “Of all the possible points of conflict between conscious planning of priorities and traditional freedoms, the regulation of wages is likely to prove the most stormy”; and of course in this context “wages” include hours and conditions of work—not only what is paid, but what it is paid for. In Canada, freedom to bargain collectively can scarcely be called one of the “traditional” freedoms; for most Canadian workers it is still a recent, hard won, and imperfect conquest. But it is none the less prized for that, and it will not be easily surrendered, even as the price of full employment. For of all the freedoms, this is perhaps the one that comes closest home to the ordinary worker.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , August 1946 , pp. 343 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1946

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Footnotes

*

This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Toronto on May 24, 1946. The problem with which it deals raises issues which are basic to the very existence of the trade union movement, and on such issues a mere trade union civil servant has neither the right nor the power to commit anyone but himself, and even himself, perhaps, only rather tentatively.

References

1 Wootton, Barbara, Freedom Under Planning (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1945), p. 102.Google Scholar

2 SirBeveridge, William, Full Employment in a Free Society (New York, 1944), p. 200.Google Scholar

3 Economic Stability in the Post-War World (Geneva, 1945), p, 204.Google Scholar

4 Beveridge, , Full Employment in a Free Society, p. 199.Google Scholar

5 Worswick, G. D. N., “The Stability and Flexibility of Full Employment” (in The Economics of Full Employment, Oxford, Eng., 1944, p. 63).Google Scholar

6 Beveridge, , Full Employment in a Free Society, p. 199.Google Scholar

7 Worswick, , “The Stability and Flexibility of Full Employment,” pp. 64–5.Google Scholar

8 Beveridge, , Full Employment in a Free Society, pp. 202–3.Google Scholar

9 General Council of the Trades Union Congress, Post-War Reconstruction: Interim Report (London, 1944), pp. 30–1.Google Scholar

10 Beveridge, , Full Employment in a Free Society, p. 203.Google Scholar

11 Worswick, , “The Stability and Flexibility of Full Employment,” pp. 65–6.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., pp. 66-8. On possible methods of price control, see the very interesting and detailed proposals in Employment Policy and Organization of Industry after the War, a report of conferences at Nuffield College, Oxford, by employers, unionists and economists (London, 1943).

13 Worswick, , “The Stability and Flexibility of Full Employment,” pp. 68–70.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., pp. 70-1.

15 Beveridge, , Full Employment in a Free Society, p. 200.Google Scholar

16 Wootton, , Freedom under Planning, pp. 105–6.Google Scholar

17 Braunthal, A., “Wage Policy and Full Employment” (in International Postwar Problems, vol. III, no. 1, New York, 1946, p. 48).Google Scholar

18 Ibid., pp. 48-9.

19 Ibid., p. 50.

20 Wootton, , Freedom under Planning, p. 113.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., p. 107.

22 Ibid., p. 108.

23 Ibid., p. 104.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., p. 118.

26 Ibid., pp. 113-14.

27 Trades Union Congress, Post-War Reconstruction, pp. 31–2.Google Scholar

28 Beveridge, , Full Employment in a Free Society, p. 171.Google Scholar

29 Wootton, , Freedom under Planning, p. 91.Google Scholar

30 For an excellent treatment of mobility in relation to social security, see Williams, Gertrude, The Price of Social Security (London, 1944).Google Scholar

31 Wootton, , Freedom under Planning, p. 89.Google Scholar

32 Beveridge, , Full Employment in a Free Society, p. 174.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., pp. 31-2.

34 Trades Union Congress, p. 31.

35 Wootton, , Freedom under Flanning, p. 94.Google Scholar