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Chapter 5

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Human relations and productivity,
1947–51

 

 

 

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Much of the change in emphasis about the productivity issue that became evident during 1947 stemmed from, and was shaped by, the growing influence of the ‘human relations’ approach to industry and its management. The term ‘human relations’ embraced a number of different perspectives and was in some ways nebulous, but its central thrust hinged upon an admonition that the workers needed to be treated as more than just a factor of production, especially if real gains in efficiency were to be made.¹ This chapter looks in detail at why the ‘human relations’ approach surfaced in 1947, and then examines how it shaped government policy over the ensuing years. Particular emphasis is placed on two official initiatives — the Committee on Industrial Productivity (CIP) and the relaunching of Joint Production Committees — though some attention will also be given to the question of incentives, seen by some contemporaries as very much a related issue.

The turn to ‘human relations’ as a key to the productivity question occurred for a number of reasons. One general factor that encouraged the change was the fact that many people were increasingly inclined to talk of productivity in general as if labour productivity were its only component. This stress on the workers’ efficiency was partly conditioned by wartime experience, when manpower planning had been so important. However, it was also encouraged by current economic circumstances: everybody recognised, after all, that in the post-war world, with resources constrained, growth must depend to some extent on how well the existing workforce did its job. What made the idea of labour productivity all the more appealing was the fact that it seemed to be fairly easily quantifiable, as Rostas's work for the Board of Trade apparently demonstrated.²

More specifically, the growing popularity of a ‘human relations’ perspective was also linked to a particular perception of what was going on in the workplace. Most on the Left believed that labour discipline had traditionally been enforced by the fear of unemployment. Moreover, it had long been predicted that once this ‘stick’ was removed, workers would respond positively, intensifying effort as a mark of gratitude for ‘their’ government's wider reforms. Unfortunately, however, there was little real evidence that this was actually happening. In fact, reports from the production front seemed often to suggest that apathy rather than a new zeal was the most common condition.

Of course, some of this comment could be dismissed as Right-wing exaggeration, but there were enough authoritative observations on this theme to indicate that it was not all the product of uninformed prejudice. Some credence had to be given to a Times Review of Industry report in April 1947, for example, which described ‘many managements’ as feeling that ‘the actual effort put forward by the individual worker’ was ‘less than … before the war’. Nor was it possible to ignore a Nature editorial on incentives which concluded: ‘while fear is happily disappearing as a goad to work, no positive enthusiasm is taking its place’. Indeed, Government Ministers could hardly fail to be aware that there was some substance here, since their exhortatory ‘Work or Want’ campaign in the spring of 1947 had achieved so little that it was openly being described as disastrous.³

For many on the Left, therefore, the important questions about production were increasingly to do with topics such as motivation. The general consensus was that ‘capitalist discipline’ had broken down; workers were, in other words, no longer afraid of their bosses’ power, largely because unemployment had ceased to exist. In this situation, as G.D.H. Cole explained, there was ‘no adequate feeling in the factories in favour of reaching the highest possible level of efficiency'; indeed, there could well be reasons why workers might be becoming more attached to a type of ‘unconscious, or half conscious, restriction’. What Labour needed to do, therefore, was to encourage the growth of a new understanding, which would provide those on the shopfloor with self-discipline. For Cole, this meant talking to the workers directly: the administration must give ‘clear indications’ to workers that it wanted not just their ‘acquiescence’ but also their ‘positive collaboration in organising to achieve the required result’.⁴

Inevitably, Ministers reacted to these promptings in somewhat different ways. Cripps had long been an enthusiast for involving the worker, though others were certainly less positive on this score. Nevertheless, during 1947 there was growing agreement in all quarters that, as one periodical put it, the ‘peculiar circumstances’ that affected productivity in Britain related ‘as much to human relations as to technical efficiency’.⁵ In these circumstances, it was inevitable that the Government should begin considering what it could do to ameliorate the situation.

One decision was to launch a formal investigation into the whole question of the human factor. The origins of this development lay with a committee that Morrison had formed in early 1947. The Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, under Sir Henry Tizard, was charged with finding the ‘most appropriate form of research effort to assist the maximum increase in … national productivity during, say, the next ten years, including research in natural and social sciences’. The Tizard Committee, as it was popularly known, was not considered to have been very successful in general, but it had come up with one significant finding, that the human factor was extremely important. Indeed, a sub-committee of the main Committee had gone so far as to argue:

Current fundamental research in physical and biological sciences is unlikely … to have any material short term effect on increasing productivity.… The blunt fact… is that the problem is essentially psychological in the short term.⁶

Clearly such a conclusion fitted the mood of late 1947 and so Ministers began discussing what it meant in practical terms. Officials reported that quite a number of organisations were already working on aspects of human relations — the Tavistock Institute, the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, etc. — but their efforts tended to be uncoordinated. In these circumstances, Ministers agreed that their best option would be to form ‘a good steering body’, a central organisation, to be named the Committee on Industrial Productivity, with several offshoots examining specific questions. Crucial amongst the latter would be a panel on human factors, which might be headed by Sir George Schuster.⁷

Schuster was in agreement with this proposal, and, as the year ended, approached both the FBI and the TUC to gain their co-operation. The TUC was generally acquiescent, though the General Secretary, V. Tewson, emphasised that he did not want all of the emphasis in the new enquiry to be on labour. Nor should public statements on what was intended lend themselves ‘to misrepresentations, such as that the workers were to be psychoanalysed’.⁸ The FBI, on the other hand, was more cautious. It was not prepared to obstruct Schuster in public, but behind the scenes remained highly suspicious. The FBI's leadership felt that it should have been consulted at an earlier stage and did not really like the whole idea anyway. An enquiry might perhaps be useful, but there were great dangers, particularly with the subject Schuster was tackling, ‘of doing harm’, particularly if ‘theorists’ became too involved.⁹

Given this climate of suspicion, those involved in an official capacity clearly felt that it was their duty to ‘talk up’ the whole project and so, during 1948, both Tizard (by now in charge of the whole CIP exercise) and Schuster were to be heard singing its praises. The former felt that he was directing a ‘survey on survival’. Britain must catch up with best overseas practice, or perish: ‘We've got to do it quickly, too…. I've set a time limit of two years. If we haven't got results in that time we shall have failed.’ Schuster made much the same kind of point, arguing that something must be done ‘to bring the laggards into line': ‘You will be starting a new era if you can get British industry to depart from its old traditional methods of secretive individualism and join in co-operative effort.'¹⁰

This was a powerful message, and it at first seemed to bring results. Thus, Schuster's panel was quickly operational and boasting a prestigious membership, including L. Russell from the BIM, J. Tanner and E.P. Harries from the TUC, and representatives from the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, the Medical Research Council and the Tavistock Institute.¹¹ This, in turn, allowed a quick start with actual investigations, the majority being joint ventures directed by the panel and carried out by teams of experts drawn from existing organisations.¹² Within a relatively short time, therefore, enquiry was being undertaken on such diverse subjects as work load and machine control (involving the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory); morale (involving the Medical Research Council's Industrial Psychology Research Unit); and human relations within particular settings (for example, the Glacier Metal Company project run by the Tavistock Institute).¹³

This was an impressive performance but, in the end, it proved difficult to sustain. Schuster's relationship with bodies such as the Medical Research Council remained less than easy, complicated by administrative and funding problems.¹⁴ Moreover, the condition of the wider CIP organisation continued to be unsatisfactory, undermined by, amongst other things, a rapid turnover of personnel.¹⁵ In fact, Tizard's first report was given an almost universally poor reception, with Industry concluding that it did ‘not inspire confidence’.¹⁶ The final blow to the whole initiative came as a result of the success of the Anglo-American Council on Productivity: as that body blossomed, the CIP was left requesting its own liquidation, convinced that the work that it had started could best be finished by others.¹⁷ The CIP had bequeathed a legacy of detailed studies and had reinforced some general points about productivity. It could not be said, however, to have galvanised either the public or the two sides of industry.

The second major development on human relations came with the relaunching of Joint Production Committees. The initial impetus here came from the TUC, and reflected that organisation's perception of the role that JPCs had played during the war period. The committees’ contribution had been ‘uneven’, but there was ‘little doubt that when they were worked with enthusiasm by both management and labour they produced excellent results’.¹⁸ This appreciation was the basis for an approach to the employers that together they should recommend to the National Joint Advisory Council (NJAC) — the major ‘peak’ tripartite body for industrial relations — that it should encourage the relaunch of JPCs. At the NJAC such a policy was agreed in the following terms:

The NJAC approved the principle of the setting up of joint consultation machinery, where it does not at present already exist, for the regular exchange of views between employers and workers on production questions provided it was clearly understood that:

(a) The machinery would be purely voluntary and advisory in character;

(b) It would not deal with the terms and conditions of employment;

(c) It would be up to each industry to decide the appropriate form of machinery.¹⁹

In advocating this policy, S. Bagnall from the TUC argued that ‘JPCs were fundamental if the workers were to be made to feel that the state of the nation was their personal concern’.²⁰ As this suggests, the TUC had come to put a great deal of weight on JPCs.

In part, this resulted from the TUC's general support for the Government's campaign to increase output. The organisation's commitment here was demonstrated in a number of ways. For example, in response to the production crisis in 1946, the TUC called a conference to encourage trade union executives to pursue the production drive; in 1947 it agreed to the partial reintroduction of labour direction under the Control of Engagements Order.²¹ Thus, the TUC was willing to go a long way with the Government's production policies. At the same time, the TUC saw JPCs giving rein to the workers’ perceived desire to be involved in production issues, as they were thought to have been in wartime. There were worries about the scope that JPCs might give to ‘disruptive’ behaviour by Communist shop stewards but, by and large, the TUC nailed its colours firmly to the mast of extending the joint committees. Successive Congresses in the late 1940s saw calls for JPCs to be made compulsory, a demand that was accepted by many unions and by Labour Party Conferences.²²

Employers’ views on JPCs were mixed. Even whilst accepting the TUC proposal for their expansion, Sir Alexander Ramsay of the FBI played down their role: ‘While agreeing that JPCs were valuable [he] could not agree that they were fundamental and that their general adoption would solve the problem of the productivity of labour.'²³ This scepticism was grounded on a number of worries about what JPCs would do.

First, employers were concerned to prevent the emphasis on JPCs directing attention away from their own view that the constraints on productivity were primarily excessive taxation, too many controls and other features of government policy. This was the agenda of issues which they emphasised when asked what could be done to raise output and productivity.²⁴ Second, employers were worried that JPCs would tend to trespass on areas of managerial prerogative, hence the emphasis on their purely advisory character. Employers bridled at the productionist rhetoric of some of the unions, believing that JPCs were seen in some quarters as the thin end of the wedge of workers’ control.²⁵

Nevertheless, many employers’ organisations in this period took up the urging of the NJAC to come to agreements on JPC machinery with the relevant unions. By 1949, employers and unions in ten industries (including engineering, iron and steel, shipbuilding and woollens) had recommended JPCs with a model constitution, while in another sixteen industries (including chemicals, furniture and tobacco) recommendations without a model constitution had been made.²⁶ By and large, employers’ national bodies were willing to endorse the extension of joint consultation.

But this support was subject to clear conditions. These included the three that were listed in the original NJAC agreement, noted above. In addition, employers were very concerned to keep JPCs as purely factory-level bodies, and resisted any wider role for them. In particular, they rejected the idea that JPCs might be involved in inter-plant visits, or might form part of local or regional networks. Hence employers opposed the idea that Regional Boards for Industry should do any more than encourage JPCs where a national agreement on their role already existed. They were wholly hostile to the view that JPCs might become part of an official system transcending the gates of the factory. This was commonly expressed by saying that joint consultation was a purely 'domestic’ matter, and certainly not part of the national planning machinery.²⁷

At the level of the peak associations the picture is one of support for JPCs, albeit qualified in a number of respects amongst the employers. This common support was accompanied by an agreement on both sides that JPCs should not deal with issues of wages and conditions. Hence productivity questions were to be clearly demarcated from those relating to wages and conditions. In many ways this was a strange position: clearly many productivity-related issues (most obviously payments systems and work reorganisation) impinged on wages and conditions. However, this dichotomy was shaped by deeply entrenched attitudes and practices. Most importantly, it reflected the strength of voluntarism in industrial relations: the belief that wages and conditions should be negotiated by a process of free collective bargaining between employers and organised workers. On the union side, support for such a view wavered only briefly under the Attlee Governments, when some (mostly on the Left) argued that the logical corollary to the planned economy that they desired was wage planning. But this position never won majority support, and quickly disappeared when the Government pursued its incomes policy from 1948 and most of the Left swung round to support free collective bargaining. This later view, too, was endorsed by employers.²⁸

Support for voluntarism meant that unions and employers together continually sought to limit the role of Government in the productivity drive, because of the recognition that such activity would always be likely to impinge on the sphere of voluntary union-employer agreement. Thus, for example, both sides resisted the idea of local conferences of employers and unions addressed by politicians on productivity issues, because, it was suggested, they would cut across the established pattern of industrial relations.²⁹

On the employers’ side, the separation of issues posed a difficult problem because the British Employers’ Confederation (BEC) dealt with wages, and the FBI with production questions. This split was reproduced at a higher level, since the National Joint Advisory Council (where the BEC represented employers) dealt with issues related to collective bargaining, while the National Production Advisory Council for Industry (NPACI) addressed issues related to production (with the FBI representing employers). Both the BEC and the FBI were adamant in maintaining these distinct channels, but JPCs posed a dilemma. On the one hand, their establishment was clearly seen by Government as a production question while, on the other, both employer bodies wanted to keep them Within the framework of collective agreements. The FBI accepted that this latter consideration meant that JPCs should come under the BEC and the NJAC. In consequence, FBI discussions of productivity explicitly excluded labour-related issues as being the preserve of the BEC.³⁰

The TUC de facto accepted this division. Whilst keen to promote JPCs as a production and productivity issue (indeed, the key to that issue), it was equally concerned to maintain the tradition of voluntary collective agreements. This posture could have eccentric results, as, for example, when the TUC accepted motion study as helpful to improved production but resisted time study as impinging on wage issues.³¹ More generally, the issue of JPCs illustrated the tension between a strong and continuing commitment to voluntary collective bargaining and a commitment to seeking improvements in productivity.

This tension was also very much present in the Government's approach to JPCs. The initial impetus for their revival came from Cripps and others who were concerned with increasing output and efficiency in the short run. To this end the production Ministries tried to use all available possibilities for the encouragement of the committees. In particular they attempted to utilise the Regional Boards for Industry for this purpose, aided by initiatives from within some of those Boards. However, the NJAC only accepted this role for Regional Boards subject to strict conditions, especially the existence of a prior national agreement relating to the relevant industry.³²

In part this employer resistance stemmed from antagonism to any governmental intervention in what employers (and, to a degree, unions) regarded as their domestic matters. Thus, both sides were unenthusiastic about alternative proposals for the Ministry of Labour rather than Regional Boards to encourage JPCs; the employers, for example, refused to supply the Ministry with the names of the firms where joint consultation had not been established. But there was acceptance that if regional agencies were to have any role in this area, it should be the Regional Industrial Relations Officers of the Ministry of Labour who should be involved, rather than the Regional Boards associated with the production Ministries.³³

The Ministry of Labour's approach to JPCs was increasingly diverging from that of the production Ministries. By the beginning of 1949 this position was quite explicit, a memorandum from the Ministry arguing that the establishment of joint consultation machinery ‘should be regarded as a principal long-term industrial relations objective, and not simply a short-term objective in the interests of increased productivity’.³⁴

As part of his enthusiasm for JPCs Cripps encouraged the Ministry of Labour to find a senior official to spearhead the policy of encouragement. In 1948 the Ministry concurred and appointed Lloyd Roberts from ICI, whose background was in personnel management. In effect the Ministry took the opportunity to involve someone who would encourage their view of JPCs and discourage the ‘productionist’ approach of Cripps. Lloyd Roberts argued that employers’ hesitancy in establishing JPCs was encouraged by the fact that the campaign was ‘primarily sponsored by the Chancellor of the Exchequer of whose views and intentions as to the future control of industry they have some suspicion’. He felt that:

It would have a beneficial effect on this aspect if gradually the Ministry of Labour came to be recognised as the sponsoring Ministry, and if, simultaneously, the emphasis in the campaign were put on the industrial relations value of joint consultation rather than on its contribution to increased productivity as a direct objective.³⁵

The Ministry of Labour's strategy was to emphasise joint consultation as a matter of good industrial relations, to be established by negotiation, and to be pursued (gently) by means of the Ministry's own Personnel Management Advisory Service. This approach was not unproblematic, as the BEC sometimes regarded the Ministry's personnel management role as an attempt to ‘teach employers their business’. Nevertheless, from 1948 onwards, the long-term industrial relations aspects of JPCs tended to dominate over the production aspects. One indication of this was the way in which the 1949 Ministry of Labour document on Joint Consultation ended up being incorporated within the Ministry's 1953 Handbook on Industrial Relations in a chapter entitled ‘Personnel Management and Joint Consultation’.³⁶

Cripps resisted this downgrading of joint consultation in relation to immediate productivity objectives. But his position in this context was weak. On the one hand, as noted above, the Ministry of Labour's view fitted more readily with the positions of the employers’ organisations and the TUC about voluntarism and the sanctity of collective agreements. On the other hand, Cripps's own attachment to the Tavistock view of joint consultation as being about building a consensus in the workplace ruled out any idea of imposing JPCs on unwilling employers. With this option ruled out, the Ministry of Labour's slow-but-sure approach was greatly strengthened.³⁷

In sum, JPCs became a major issue in 1947 because both senior Ministers in the Government and the TUC saw them as tying together the immediately compelling issue of achieving more output and the feeling that a new deal for the workers in the factories was both desirable and necessary under conditions of full employment. In the initial enthusiasm, human relations appeared to link these two things in a manner that was politically congenial to the Government. But human relations notions which were taken seriously were an ambiguous basis for a campaign on JPCs which had the intention of rapidly raising productivity. In fact, human relations doctrine, along with the structure of British industrial relations, facilitated the incorporation of the committees into a quite different project, where they would be but a small addition to the armoury of good industrial relations practice, encouraged (but no more) by a Ministry of Labour determined to maintain the voluntarist basis of those relations.

How did all of this impact on another traditional Left-wing aim, the achievement of industrial democracy? Industrial democracy was certainly an important element in the political rhetoric of the Labour Government. In the 1945 Manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, the issue was not mentioned, but by the time of the 1950 Labour statement of principles, Labour and the New Society, ‘democracy in the workplace’ was said to be central to the creation of a ‘live democracy’.³⁸ What was the relation between Labour's notions of industrial democracy and the policy emphasis on joint consultation?

The institutional implications of industrial democracy had, of course, long been argued about within the Labour Party, especially in the context of proposals for nationalisation. In the early 1930s the crucial battles were fought out in relation to Morrison's concept of the public corporation in which management would be appointed on the basis of expertise rather than interest representation. Advocates of workers’ control fought this approach, but were decisively defeated.³⁹

These discussions were re-opened in the late 1940s as the process of nationalisation took place, but the Ministerial commitment to the Morrison model never wavered; although trade unionists sat on nationalised industry boards (and the Central Electricity Board was chaired by Lord Citrine, ex-General Secretary of the TUC), they were explicitly there as experts not worker representatives. Coupled to this was the fact that joint consultation systems were enshrined in most of the nationalisation statutes. As purely consultative mechanisms with a limited agenda some of these seem to have had a degree of success.⁴⁰

Policy on the nationalised industries showed how the concept of industrial democracy became almost synonymous with joint consultation and its human relations logic under the Attlee Government. Certainly, official policy statements reflected this conflation. For example, Labour Believes in Britain included a section on ‘Democracy in Industry’ which read:

Industrial Democracy is advancing. Increasingly, the government consults with industry and industry puts its own difficulties before the Government. Development Councils, Joint Production Committees, Pit Committees and Works Councils are growing in importance in our industrial life. But these are only a beginning. More has to be done. The worker is still too often treated as a mere cog in the machine. Management must therefore be willing to bring workpeople into fuller consultation. And the worker must be ready to shoulder responsibility as well as claim rights.⁴¹

Labour did regard industrial democracy as very important in this period. For example, when the National Executive set out priorities for research in October 1946, the second item (after ‘criteria for nationalisation') was ‘economic democracy’. This was, however, defined as an ‘examination of methods whereby workers can take a constructive part in the formulation of industrial policy and be induced to feel that they are working for the good of the community’. The Research Department document which followed, whilst suggesting a need for more experimentation in forms of industrial democracy, concluded: ‘meanwhile we shall push ahead with the instrument the Labour Movement has now chosen for the participation by every worker in industrial democracy -joint consultation at all levels’.⁴²

This position was not without its opponents. As already noted, the late 1940s saw unsuccessful pressures to reopen discussion about the workers’ role in the management of the public corporation. This was linked to a wider debate on the meaning of industrial democracy and joint consultation. For example, the Union of Post Office Workers (UPW), long an advocate of workers’ control, proposed a system of joint management for the Post Office, based on 50 per cent union representation on a managing board. The debate over this brought out some of the difficulties of those who wanted industrial democracy to mean something rather more than joint consultation. Perhaps most interestingly, G.D.H. Cole, long Labour's most important advocate of radical forms of such democracy, accepted the UPW view that joint consultation was different from joint management. But he also argued that the UPW scheme was about trade union control, rather than ‘real’ workers’ control, which made it undesirable.⁴³

More equivocally, even Cole was willing to see joint consultation as embodying ‘the spirit of democracy’, and as something to be pursued independently of whether managers were elected or worked in public or private sectors. For him, joint consultation was a basic element in the social application of democracy; and some measure of joint consultation was therefore ‘an economic corollary to the admission of democratic rights for everybody on the political plane’. This argument of Cole's reflected both his rather pessimistic assessment of the current strength of belief in workers’ control within the labour movement, and, more broadly, the lack of a coherent doctrine of such control in the new circumstances of the 1940s.⁴⁴ In this he was typical. Though there was a pervasive undercurrent of discontent about the collapse of industrial democracy into joint consultation, this discontent did not cohere into a significant theoretical argument or political force. Joint consultation and its human relations underpinnings therefore faced no significant opposition within Labour ranks over this period, and in fact tended to ‘crowd out’ any alternative vision of what industrial democracy might mean.

How, therefore, did the campaign to establish JPCs progress in this period? There is no doubt that some success was achieved, in the simple sense that many such committees were formed during the late 1940s and early 1950s. As noted above, by 1949 a significant proportion of industries had national agreements which encouraged JPCs or other forms of joint consultation, and the evidence, though imperfect, suggests that many firms responded to this encouragement.

The latest extant enquiry on the whole subject was conducted by the BEC in the middle of 1950. This suggested that most large industries had discussed and found agreement on joint consultation and that, within those industries where agreement had been reached, over 50 per cent of firms had instituted mechanisms for such consultation. Whilst this particular survey had no figures on the point, it recognised that the existence of JPCs was highly correlated with size. Slightly earlier data suggested that, on ‘rough estimates’, in firms with over 1,000 workers, 75 per cent had JPCs; in those with 500–1,000 workers, 50 per cent had JPCs; and in those with 150–250 workers, 30–40 per cent had JPCs.⁴⁵

Evidence on the industrial distribution of JPCs is also imperfect, but some material survives. A survey covering a representative sample of 600 firms in 1949 found that JPCs were most prevalent in engineering

Table 5.1 Firms with Joint Production Committee machinery, 1949 sample

	Joint Production Committee
Sector	In practice	Never operated	Discontinued
Engineering	216	12	1
Shipbuilding	3	5	1
Iron and steel	11	5	0
Other heavy industry	36	28	4
Textiles	15	8	1
Building	3	7	6
Clothing	31	9	0
Food and tobacco	24	8	0
Printing	13	0	0
Other	87	38	20
Overall %	73	20	7

Source: W. Robson-Brown and N.A. Howell-Everson, Industrial Democracy at Work: A Factual Survey(London, 1950), pp. 7–9.

(see Table 5.1). This was perhaps unsurprising. Wartime JPCs had been concentrated in this industry, and the employers and unions in engineering had been the first to agree to revive them in 1947. Another estimate suggested that JPCs covered 782,000 out of a possible 1.25m workers in the industry. On the other hand, some sectors almost entirely lacked JPCs — perhaps most notably cotton, where they were favoured by neither employers nor unions.⁴⁶ Elsewhere, finally, though both sides were willing, progress was delayed because of disagreement on the terms on which the bodies would function. Especially controversial was the issue of whether all of the workers’ representatives should be union members. This led to a long wrangle in the chemical industry, eventually settled on the employers’ terms.⁴⁷

Whilst substantial progress was made with the creation of JPCs, from the point of view of Ministers this occurred too slowly. Who was to blame here? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, each side criticised the other. Trade union leaders pointed out that insistence on the participation of non-unionists inhibited expansion, while there were also general complaints about employer resistance. Nevertheless, union leaders, too, recognised that rank and file workers often lacked enthusiasm for JPCs. Employers’ organisations bemoaned the apathy of local union officials and rank and file workers, though it is clear that their own members were often quite hostile as well.⁴⁸

The Ministry of Labour's opinion was that both of these views reflected an element of the truth. As Lloyd Roberts noted:

My general conclusion is that the basic reason for the slow progress being made in establishing joint consultation machinery is the apathy of the general body of workers and district and local trade union officials, an apathy of which employers are quite willing to take advantage.

These attitudes were explained in the following terms:

Some employers still feel that joint consultation has a political aspect and is the thin end of the wedge, leading to joint management or workers’ control. Probably there are not many workers who understand the principle of joint consultation. If they are militant they may regard it as a step toward further control; if they are of a more average type, they may regard the idea with suspicion as a means of earning profits for the employer. In other cases both employers and workers confuse joint consultation with ordinary wage negotiating machinery.⁴⁹

Independent sources, whilst bringing out regional and sectoral variations, also suggest that, broadly speaking, enthusiasm for joint consultation was inversely related to status in the hierarchy on either side of industry (though with the TUC always more enthusiastic than the BEC), so that national agreements were much easier to reach than those at factory level. If JPCs were established this usually arose from management rather than worker/union initiative.⁵⁰

The BEC survey of 1950 also analysed the level at which employers and unions had agreed to implement joint consultation. The evidence from this confirms that almost all of the arrangements were for factory level bodies, perhaps with national councils as well. Most clearly excluded regional or district machinery. The only agreement relating to the regional level was in building, where a major stimulus to this kind of organisation seems to have been material shortages. This was coupled to an absence of agreement on site committees, which the BEC strongly resisted. Furthermore, district agreements were entirely absent except in the very special cases of farming and ports.⁵¹

What did the JPCs do? Here evidence is even more sparse and difficult to interpret. A large-scale survey by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology found, like other studies, that welfare issues occupied a large part of the deliberations ('all tea and toilets’ was a popular, dismissive view), though this survey also noted that such an emphasis was disliked by the workers’ representatives on JPCs, who were critical of rank and file concerns.⁵²

This focus did not seem to draw objections from the employers. They did not like JPCs degenerating into ‘complaints committees’, but a more common problem from their point of view occurred when the forums became mere platforms for the political propaganda of subversive elements. This latter situation worried Ministers as well, though there is no way of telling whether it was ever really prevalent.⁵³

Perhaps more significant was the complaint by employers that workers and unions tended to try to get the JPCs to encroach on the sphere of collective bargaining. This fits in with some independent evidence, which reported workers as viewing the joint consultation forum as a suitable medium for negotiating benefits.⁵⁴ That employers (and union leaders) so strongly resisted this cannot have helped to offset the very rank and file apathy that was so frequently diagnosed.

Did JPCs succeed? The BEC survey of 1950 found a generally favourable response from employers, though presumably those who had established the committees were predisposed to see their benefits. The nature of those benefits was impressive — ‘In the main replies indicate that the Committees have been of general utility’ — with some firms reporting a better team spirit, a fall in absenteeism and an improved flow

Table 5.2 Management assessments of Joint Production Committees in 216 engineering firms, 1950

Issue	Favourable	Verdict No Effect	Unfavourable
Output	129	87	-
Morale	183	33	-
Discipline	131	85	-
Absenteeism	117	99	-
Turnover/personnel	72	144	-
Reduced friction	196	20	-

Source: W. Robson-Brown and N.A. Howell-Everson, Industrial Democracy at Work: A FactualSurvey (London, 1950), p. 42.

of information to the workers.⁵⁵ A survey of 216 JPCs in engineering examined management assessments of their effect; the results are shown in Table 5.2.

These figures certainly suggest a positive outcome from JPCs, though the emphasis on morale-raising effects perhaps gives some substance to the Ministry of Labour view that the committees had their greatest impact as an element of improved personnel management. Certainly, by 1950 the Ministry believed that:

A noteworthy feature is that a number of firms are now displaying interest in joint consultation not as an aim in itself but as one of the techniques of modern personnel management and therefore helpful in attracting and retaining the better type of employee.⁵⁶

Looking at the question of assessment in a wider context, it is clear that against the history of claims for industrial democracy and workers’ control, the joint consultation movement in Britain in the 1940s was really a fairly conservative programme. Compared to the claims of guild socialists in the early years of the century, or to the Bullock proposals of the 1970s, this was a mild policy. Similarly, in comparison with what happened in, for example, France and Germany during the 1940s, the JPCs hardly appear radical. In France, a 1945 decree established Comités d'entreprìse as compulsory in enterprises with more than 100 workers, with a remit which covered both welfare and production issues (though, as in Britain, they were to be essentially consultative, and fenced off from questions of wages and conditions). In Germany, the British Government pushed through even more radical measures, establishing a system of co-determination, with a parity of workers’ representatives on company supervisory boards and a sub-structure of compulsory works councils.⁵⁷

In Britain, however, the doctrine of human relations acted as a blockage to such radicalism. It ruled out compulsion as inappropriate, because the machinery of joint consultation was not an end in itself but essentially the representation and reinforcement of a pre-existing consensus in the workplace. In fact, the Ministry of Labour went so far as to refuse to collect systematic data about the existence of JPCs on the grounds that the ‘criteria of success in joint consultation lies in the degree to which it assists in the development of a sense of co-operation and mutual responsibility, rather than in the mere existence of works committees’.⁵⁸

Perhaps even more significantly, such a doctrine cut across notions of industrial democracy in any strong sense of the word ‘democracy’. Radical solutions here must always to some degree challenge managerial/employer legitimacy, in that they stake a claim for workers as by right having a say in running enterprises. Such rights can be grounded in different ways. They may be based on the Marxist labour theory of value (as in much syndicalism and guild socialism), or on a notion of democratic rights as in political democracy (the Bullock Report's position). But, however argued, they always dispute the unfettered right to manage. By contrast, human relations doctrine and its institutional representation through forms of joint consultation explicitly endorsed the right to manage, albeit in a particular way. As one of its leading ideologues in the 1940s and 1950s expressed this, the fundamental problem was ‘how to combine authority and participation — leadership and co-operation’. And this was at bottom a problem for management Such a view was accepted quite explicitly, too, by the TUC:

Joint consultation machinery is essentially advisory as distinct from executive in its scope. In the last resort, and after full discussions with their employees, the responsibility for policy decisions must rest on the Boards concerned. The limitation, which is inherent in the policy of Congress, must be recognised and accepted and joint consultation machinery must not be expected to give executive power to worker representatives.⁵⁹

Trade union acceptance of this doctrine was not, of course, just a question of ‘ideology’. It was founded on the well-entrenched practices of adversarial collective bargaining, which had become the raison d'etre of British trade unions. There could not be any blurring of the lines of responsibility between the rights and duties of workers and those of employers. This had long been the major basis of union objections to any form of industrial democracy, and it remained well entrenched into the 1940s (and beyond).⁶⁰

The impact of human relations and joint consultation have, therefore, to be seen in the context of the absence of fundamental change in the structure of industrial relations during the Attlee period. Whilst some traditional features of those relations were suspended over these years -for example, by the continuation of compulsory arbitration, bans on strikes and the pursuit of an incomes policy (albeit non-statutory) — little was permanently altered.⁶¹ As noted above, ‘wage planning’ was never accepted, and the attempt continued to maintain a sharp distinction between wage bargaining and productivity issues.

In the long run this latter distinction was probably fatal to joint consultation. As Alan Flanders wrote:

The strict separation of joint consultation from collective bargaining is difficult to maintain in practice, certainly within individual establishments. Moreover the attempt to do so invariably destroys the workers’ interest in it. The really successful experiments in joint consultation appear to have developed in firms where the close connection between the subject matter of consultation and negotiation has been recognised, and the same or similar committees have been used for both purposes.⁶²

Flanders's diagnosis is supported by what happened in the 1950s. Despite continued enthusiasm for joint consultation under the Conservative Governments after 1951 the evidence is reasonably clear that the machinery involved suffered a serious decline during that decade. By 1957 a Ministry of Labour official felt ‘chastened’ by a survey which suggested that less than one third of firms with 250 or more workers had mechanisms of joint consultation. The cause of this decline had much to do with the growth of shop stewards as a potent force at workplace level. With an alternative focus for shopfloor trade unionism, joint consultation simply withered away.⁶³

As noted above, in the 1940s joint consultation had been pressed from ‘on high’, the TUC being notably more committed than local officials or the rank and file. The shop steward movement had been weakened by demobilisation and conversion to civilian production at the end of the war, and there is some evidence that where stewards survived as a force in the late 1940s this inhibited the growth of joint consultation, though undoubtedly some shop stewards did try to use the consultative machinery.⁶⁴

The attempted severance of wage issues from joint consultation not only affected the enthusiasm of the workers for the latter but also narrowed the range of productivity issues which consultation could encourage. Perhaps most importantly, it curtailed the possibility of using wage incentives as a means of obtaining higher production and productivity.

As has been shown, much of the emphasis on human relations derived from the view that, in the absence of the ‘stick’ of unemployment, high production and productivity would require the ‘carrot’ of better treatment for the worker in the factory. Such an approach could be endorsed from a managerial perspective, and also remained compatible with the Leftist belief concerning the intrinsic desirability of better treatment for the workers; in fact, in the 1940s there was a substantial rapprochement between these two views. But this did not answer questions about the other obvious Carrot’, higher pay by wage incentives.

For some on the Left, wage incentives were inappropriate in the new post-war regime: raising production and productivity was to be seen as a social duty, not something fuelled by individual payments. However, such a view was always confined to a small minority. Ian Mikardo voiced the typical attitude of both the political and union wings of the Labour Movement in 1947 when he attacked ‘extremists’ who believed either social duty or wage incentives would alone encourage better output.⁶⁵

Mikardo went on to argue that traditional piece rate systems had been discredited by their arbitrary, complicated and often regressive character. He also tried to bridge the gap between ‘human relations’ and wage incentives by arguing that piece rates often affected output not because they directly raised incomes, but rather because they set the workers a clear task and informed them how well or badly they had achieved it. His attempted ‘middle-road’ thus included favouring small group incentives as against those that were individually oriented.⁶⁶ Whilst Labour's ideologues and management experts conducted a long debate about material versus moral incentives,⁶⁷ in practice the extension of incentive schemes seems to have met with little resistance. For example, discussion about the issue between employers and the TUC at the NJAC found both sides resisting a direct role for the Ministry of Labour in propagandising such schemes, but only on the grounds that these things should be done by collective agreement without government interference, not because of any hesitancy about principle.⁶⁸

The Government's direct role in wage payment systems was therefore rather limited by employer and union hostility. However, the problem also came up in other areas of official policy. For example, during the wage freeze of 1948–50 it was accepted that wage increases linked to such incentive schemes would be exempt from control.⁶⁹ At the same time, the Government remained sensitive to the claims that high income tax rates acted as a deterrent to effort, and various ideas were floated on this, including the exemption of overtime pay in some industries from income tax (though such breeches in the general character of the income tax rules were successfully resisted, not least by the Inland Revenue).⁷⁰ Finally, the Government also worried that the rationing and the general shortage of consumer goods was a disincentive to effort, though here its hands were substantially tied by the macroeconomic imperative to divert the bulk of resources into exports and investment.⁷¹

Ministry of Labour figures suggest that payment by results did increase in this period. Calculations for 1951 demonstrated that 28 per cent of adult males and 32 per cent of all workers were paid in this way, compared with 18 and 25 per cent respectively in 1938. In some industries, too, there was evidence of a concurrent, significant shift in union attitudes towards piecework.⁷² But this change largely took place on a separate track from the issue of joint consultation. This separation of discussion about incentive issues and the joint consultation machinery gave an air of unreality to the proceedings of the latter. Here was an area where workers were most likely to be highly interested in the implications of raising productivity, yet it could not be discussed in the consultative mechanism.

A similar point can be made about restrictive labour practices. In Chapter 8 we argue that the importance of these practices in inhibiting productivity growth has been exaggerated in much recent literature, without warrant from contemporary evidence. But whatever the importance of restrictive practices, they, like wage incentives, had to be primarily addressed in the context of wage bargaining, separated off from most of the debate about productivity. Typically, it was the BEC which produced a report on these practices, whilst the FBI's discussions of productivity explicitly ignored them.⁷³ Thus, coupling the productivity drive so strongly to human relations was far from an unqualified success. It highlighted certain themes — consultation, works information, the role of the foreman — whilst tending to sideline others, such as the array of issues under the heading of ‘ Americanisation’ that is discussed in Chapter 7. That the drive was pursued in the context of a largely unreformed industrial relations system also raised tensions, by excluding certain pertinent issues from the debate on productivity. Moreover, whilst not wishing to over-emphasise one facet of the problem, it is surely plausible to say that a more radical policy to raise productivity could have been pursued if wage issues had not been regarded as ‘off limits’.

Finally, it should be noted that emphasis on human relations also caused tensions within Labour's ideology and politics. The attractions of human relations to certain Labour positions at this time is surely clear. It provided the basis of a rapprochement with ‘progressive’ managerial circles in a context where Labour gave a high priority both to consensus and co-operation in general and to its links with progressive middle-class opinion in particular. Thus, for example, a Labour Party document on industrial democracy of this period cited G.S. Walpole's Management and Men, a classic ‘progressive management’ text, as embodying exactly the right approach to social relations in the factory.⁷⁴

Yet this posture was problematic for Labour. Human relations ideology was based on a ‘unitary’ notion of the enterprise, as the (potential) site for the pursuit of common purposes between workers and owners. No doubt more sophisticated versions of the doctrine could accept the inescapability of some conflict of interest in the enterprise, but the basic thrust was clear.⁷⁵ Yet this emphasis on co-operation and consensus in the factory co-existed with an undiminished commitment to an adversarial form of wage bargaining. In the immediate post-war period, with the trade unions willing to go a very long way to accommodate government policy, this tension remained containable. But with the revival of shop-floor trade unionism in the 1950s, the 1940s ‘package’ proved to be an unsustainable basis upon which Labour could even consider building a new politics of the enterprise.