Labor Trouble

The Labor Government found itself in the middle of a rip-roaring open-shop v. closed-shop fight last week. On the open-shop side hovered management and Britain's bevy of small, independent unions. On the closed-shop side hulked the big unions. The issue: Can the Government, of which the big unions are the mainstay, use its powers to enjoin the closed shop?

The swinging started over a dozen individualistic tram conductors, members of the small Passenger Workers' Union. They had staunchly refused to join the big Transport & General Workers' Union. Just as the Labor Government lifted wartime restrictions on the transport and mining industries, the big union issued a growling ultimatum to the trolleymen's employer, the London Passenger Transport Board: either the twelve must be fired, or all of London's buses would stop. The Board capitulated. But the Passenger Workers' Union forthwith prepared to fight for an injunction against the men's dismissal. Unless the injunction was granted, thousands of other independent union members faced firing. Cried the independents: "Dictatorship!" Replied London's Laborite Daily Herald: "The majority cannot risk being perpetually at the mercy of the minority."

The powerful National Union of Mine Workers gave the Labor Government another bad turn last week when it elected Arthur Horner as its General Secretary. Horner is a Communist. But so well do the miners like him that they elected Horner only three months after they had flatly rejected affiliation with the Communist Party. Even Ernie Bevin and Herbert Morrison were prepared to admit that Horner was an efficient union leader and a nice chap. But, they fretted, "we wish he wasn't a Communist."

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