Wed Nov 22 04:24:17 EST 2006
Published by EH.NET (November 2006)
James W. Stitt, _Joint Industrial Councils in British History:
Inception, Adoption and Utilization, 1917-1939_. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2006. iii + 219 pp. $120 (hardcover), ISBN: 0-313-32461-1.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Paul Benneworth, Institute for Policy and
Practise, Newcastle University.
In this book, James Stitt (Professor of History at High Point
University in North Carolina) deals with an attempt by the British
Government to deal with industrial unrest and falling productivity in
the war industries by creating an institutional innovation. Those
innovations were Joint Industrial Councils (JIC), organized at the
level of the industrial sector, in which owners and workers'
representatives came together to manage various aspects of industrial
relations. However, the Joint Industrial Councils, never forced onto
industrial sectors by the British Government, were never really very
successful as voluntary arrangements. Although a large number of
councils were created in the inter-war period, the innovation ground
to a halt in the mid 1920s, and disappeared by the start of World War
II.
The book explores why an apparently promising and timely
institutional innovation failed to transform the landscape of UK
industrial relations. The book presents a very detailed piece of
research which traces the evolution of the idea, to its emergence as
a political proposal, the uptake of the proposal, and then its slow
disappearance. The last chapter presents four examples of JICs which
did operate during the period 1917-1939. The most telling example is
the Pottery JIC, which was managed by Fred Hand, the only full-time
employee of any of the councils. The author quotes evidence which
suggests that it was more the force of Hand's personal obsession with
JICs that kept the organizations, and the representative Association
of JICs, active after the mid 1920s.
The author summarizes the book's overall points, including the
reference to the obsession of Hand, in the opening chapter, which
operates as a kind of abstract for the whole book. The book then
sets up in elaborate detail the industrial conditions which
necessitated the introduction of an institutional fix, out of which
came the JIC proposal. The issue ultimately related to the pre-war
York Agreement between the main skilled engineers trade union, the
Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE), and employers.
The engineering sector had suffered considerable industrial unrest
because of owner/worker conflict around the introduction of new
working practices whose costs were borne by workers but which
profited the owners. The York Agreement was a ceasefire in this
industrial struggle, a very detailed prescription which ultimately
sought to protect ASE members by limiting employers' capacities to
reorganize work and hence destroy members' jobs.
The York Agreement did, however, create a problem with the onset of
World War I -- that the UK industrial base was very unresponsive to
the UK Government's demand for war materials, particular after 1914
and the transition to a fully mobilized war economy. The Agreement
appeared to stand in the way of increasing production in war
industries. Trade Unions were willing to suspend the agreement for
the duration of hostilities, but wanted to make sure that this did
not prejudice members' rights won in the York Agreement after the
return to peacetime. The Treasury Agreement established this
principle between industry and workers, giving a de facto Government
guarantee without stipulating the details of how it would be achieved.
From 1916, Asquith's government began planning the 'reconstruction
effort' for this transition back to the pre-1914 laissez-faire
economy. The Reconstruction Committee accepted that this transition
could revitalize British industry if it could institutionalize the
Treasury Agreement in which workers would sacrifice their permanent
rights to jobs in return for sharing in profits increasing from
innovation and productivity growth. There was consensus of the value
of institutionalizing this idea, both by owners who saw the
opportunities for increasing productivity levels and from left-wing
industrial idealists who saw such collaborations as the first step
towards a wider workers' takeover of industry. JICs emerged as a
concrete proposal implementing this 'profits for productivity' deal.
The story so far is perfectly rational, but from late 1916 party
politics entered the scene, and the consensus for rebuilding British
industry through collective owner/worker agreement collapsed into
sectional fighting, which ultimately left the JIC proposals with no
chance of success. Firstly, Lloyd George replaced Asquith as Prime
Minister through a parliamentary coup, and immediately appointed new
members to the Reconstruction Committee, delaying the publication of
their report. An engineers' strike in 1917 led Lloyd George to
promise that the Reconstruction Committee report would meet their
demands in full when it was published in the autumn. The JIC
proposals within this Report became a means to meet union demands,
despite a very scathing minority opinion from one Committee member.
Neither the details of the JIC proposals nor the general idea to
politically modernize British industry featured in Lloyd George's
1918 election campaign, fought around the dual issues of punishing
the Germans and "homes fit for heroes." The Committee became the
Ministry of Reconstruction, whose activities were subsumed in 1919
into four new departments, leaving JICs the responsibility of firstly
the Board of Trade then finally the (very weak) Ministry of Labour. A
few JICs were, indeed, formed and Hand, the head of the Pottery JIC,
became responsible for the collective association, AJIC. It was the
force of his personality which sustained any kind of profile at all
for the idea. Even in the 1930s, there was a serious discussion --
driven by Hand -- about making JICs compulsory for eligible firms.
This move -- and the underlying JIC ideal -- was successfully
repelled by the increasingly powerful Trade Unions Congress, who
would come to dominate industrial relations in a manner inconceivable
to the weak JICs.
In writing the pr=E9cis of the content and the arguments of the book, I
have disguised the great difficulties I had in reading this book. The
opening abstract is too dense to really make much sense, and would
work much better as a concluding summary. Indeed, the whole book
assumes an incredibly detailed knowledge by the reader, and often
explains the significance of events several pages after they are
first mentioned. The pace of the book is dilatory; although the
book's title covers JICs from 1917-1939, it is only three-quarters of
the way through the book that the author reaches 1917, and then has
two chapters to cover the twenty-two years of their operations.
Thus, the reader is never sure if an argument the author makes will
turn out to be the last word on the situation.
The book is also peculiarly lacking in contextual detail,
establishing why the JICs might or could have been significant in the
industrial relations landscape of the UK, which further hinders
reading the book. The book is therefore uncomfortably positioned
between being a review of primary evidence sources and using that
evidence to develop a strong narrative of the author's opinions of
the development of events. Although this book is undoubtedly the
product of serious scholarship, and its findings strengthen our
understanding of this interesting time, I am not sure that this work
is destined, or indeed deserves, to reach an audience much beyond the
extent of the seriously committed researcher.
Dr. Paul Benneworth is a Research Councils UK Academic Fellow in
Territorial Governance at the Institute for Policy and Practise at
Newcastle University. He contributed entries on the decline of
British manufacturing and changing female unemployment to the
_Reader's Guide to British History_, and has recently published the
book _The Rise of the English Regions?_ in the Routledge Cities and
Regions series.
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