Ruling a Kingless Kingdom

As Britain's top labor leader, Vic Feather must try to hold sway over 155 fiercely independent unions that often prefer to behave, as one union boss put it, like "baronies in a kingless kingdom." At Portsmouth, where Feather was elected to a four-year term as head of the Trades Union Congress last month, the barons were flexing their muscles. "The problem is not that we have too many strikes," cried one official, "but that we don't have enough."

If a revolution from the top is what it will take to tame the unions, Victor Grayson Hardie Feather may be just the man to bring it off. He has the name,* and the background. The son of a sometime furniture polisher and full-time pacifist, Feather was born in the milling town of Bradford and went to work filling flour sacks at 14. He worked nights on a local Socialist paper, where he used to talk politics with the publisher's daughter, who is now Minister of Employment and Productivity, Barbara Castle. At 29, choosing unionism "because I wanted to get rid of poverty," Feather started off with the T.U.C. as a local organizer. He is still well known among the rank and file, and he is not at all reluctant to personally wade into trouble on the shop floor. Nor is he shy about lapsing occasionally into the Yorkshire-accented billingsgate that he has perfected over the years in leading T.U.C.'s toughest negotiations--including British Ford's acceptance of unions at Dagenham during World War II. At 61, he lives with his wife in the same small semidetached villa near London Airport he has had for more than 30 years. Though his salary is less than princely ($9,240), he has managed to assemble a good collection of paintings and sculpture.

Feather is not a man for abstractions, but he does argue that "the unions' critics don't know what they're talking about; the unions are not powerful enough." If the unions were really as strong as they should be, he argues, they would be able to enforce production-line peace. That is vital to labor--and to Harold Wilson's Labor Party, whose future thus depends heavily on Feather's touch.

* A roll call of British labor pioneers: Victor Grayson became Britain's first independently elected Labor Member of Parliament in 1908. Keir Hardie founded the Independent Labor Party in 1893.

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