Wildcats on the Loose

The nations of the Continent have long belittled Britain for its inability to curb wildcat strikes. Last week wildcatters in the shipping and motor industries were giving British officials fits, as usual. Suddenly, however, those walkouts seemed as harmless as prolonged tea breaks compared with what was happening across the Channel: > In Italy, 130,000 workers left Turin's Fiat plant, and thousands more struck the Pirelli rubberworks in Milan, in both cases for higher wages. In the first six months of this year, walkouts cost some 81 million man-hours. Worse is in prospect, for labor contracts affecting half of the country's 7,000,000 industrial workers expire before year's end. >In West Germany, where the booming economy of the Wirtschaftswunder has kept employees content for years, garbage collectors walked out in Munich and Nuernberg last week to demand better pay. Earlier, there were almost-unheard-of wildcat strikes by West Berlin bus and subway employees, Ruhr steelworkers and Saar coal miners. > In France, the trains, subways and buses began rolling again after a week of wildcat strikes. But almost immediately, unofficial stoppages happened at random from the Channel to the Italian border, and 10,000 employees at the huge Renault plant near Paris are threatening to strike next week for shorter hours.

The English Sickness. In many cases, something more was involved than the usual demands for better pay and conditions. The workers were ignoring their union leaders, whom they often regard as too timid or too ready to cooperate with management. They were also reflecting demands for broad social change. Said an Italian labor leader: "Workers are thinking now of participation in industrial and social decisions as well as of wages and pensions."

Italy's bargaining climate is certainly not helped by the succession of three weak caretaker governments that have held power since May 1968. But far deeper causes underlie much of the labor unrest. Italian workers are caught between the higher cost of living brought on by the nation's celebrated II Boom and a notoriously unresponsive national leadership. Italy's public services, from education to rapid transit, are among the poorest in Western Europe.

West Germany's labor troubles may well reflect political opportunism more than anything else. As national elections neared, workers knew that the government would jump to settle with strikers rather than risk disorders. Sure enough, hardly had some 25,000 metalworkers and 50,000 coal workers walked off their jobs than they won wage hikes of 11% and 13% respectively. What bothered Germans more than the size of the settlements, however, was the fact that both were won in wildcat strikes --a tactic almost never used by West Germany's well-disciplined labor unions. Some businessmen wondered aloud whether Germany had caught the "English sickness" that allows British shop stewards to close whole industries in defiance of national union leaders.

France has proved particularly susceptible to the sickness since its workers returned from their August vacations to the cold realities of President Georges Pompidou's austerity program. Pompidou rightly fears that a round of wage increases would force him to cheapen the recently devalued franc still further. A policy of intransigence, on the other hand, could lead to massive shutdowns. There was some speculation that Pompidou might have hit upon a middle alternative last week when he suggested that Renault workers be made shareholders in the factory (Charles de Gaulle's "participation" plan, by contrast, offered workers a role in policymaking).

Whether or not Pompidou's ploy works, it was plain that the unequal distribution of wealth in France--and elsewhere--was one of the root causes of the current unrest. Said Political Commentator Jean Ferniot: "The war has moved from the political to the social battlefield." And, as in beleaguered Britain, nobody can be sure where the next skirmish might break out.

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