December 20, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
n 
The Whitley Councils 
By Jason 
IT was said "in the early articles of the series that tiie 
workman wants more than good wages and steady 
employment ; that he wants a place in the sun ; such 
conditions as will enable him to make the most, of his 
life, a new feeling of responsibility for the enterprise to which 
he gives his energy, and the sense in fine of true and acti\'e 
citizenship alike in industiy and in politics. 
How far can the Industrial Councils go towards satisfyuig 
this demand ? 
Formerly, industry was regarded as a world of competing 
units, and the workman as so much labour to be applied here 
or there, at the will of capital. The war has destroyed the 
iirst of these' conceptions, bringing into clear relief the im- 
portance of substituting some corporate industrial effort 
for this state of conflict. Industry is learning the use and value 
of association. If this idea had grown up under other con- 
ditions, it might have resulted merely in the expansion of 
employers' associations into bodies accepted as representing 
the common interests of the industry'. Before the war we 
had seen a tendency among employers to create large scale 
organisations for deaUng with labour difficulties, and ;t might 
have seemed a small step to advance from such an organisation 
to an organisation that looks after such matters as buying 
and selling, research and education. 
It is fortunate then that this development has taken place 
undei conditions that forbid so narrow a construction. For 
the war has destroyed the second, and not only the first 
of these conceptions. The war has made it impossible to 
treat the employer as the sole representative of industry. In 
practice the Government have found that they could not 
carry on the war and refuse to the Trade Unions the right to 
participate in the decisions and policy for which the Govern- 
ment and an industry are jointly responsible. Where the 
Government liave failed, failure has been due to. a reluctance 
to c^ct on this principle. Where it has been applied, success 
has been astonishing. The leaving certificate was an example 
of the method that ignored the claims of the workman and put 
him in the old and false position ; the certificate has been 
discredited, and it has now disappeared. On the other hand, 
the Advisory Committee in the Textil<- Industries, where 
employers' associations and workmen's unions have co-oper- 
ated in acconnnodating the demands of the Amiy to the needs 
of the industries, has carried out a delicate operation efficiently 
and without friction or injustice. The same success has marked 
'the work of the Committees on absenteeism in the Coal Mines] 
and there is little doubt that the administration of the railways 
would have gained if the capable leaders of the railwaymen 
had been given a share in the work and authority of the Kail- 
way Committee. 
But the most striking application of the new principle has 
been the inclusion of the Trade Unions' representatives on the 
Boards controlling the Cotton and the Woollen industries. 
These Boards have to decide questions of great importance : 
among others, the granting of licenses for selling and buying, 
how raw material shall be allocated, what hours and what 
days factories shall run, and whether a standard cloth shall be 
produced at a fixed price. It is thus recognised that the work- 
min should have a voice in these questions, and that the 
old view that he merely had to take the orders of a master, 
whose business it was to think and act for his workpeople, is 
no longer tenable. This is an innovation of the greatest 
significance, as the cstabhshment of a principle. As an actual 
experiment, it will have great and decisive results, for men 
cannot sit round a Board and work together without creating 
a certain atmosphere of custom. Twenty or thirty men meet- 
ing every week or every fortnight soon cease to be merely 
twenty or thirty men. They become some kind of entity ; 
producing a certain spirit and habit of action. ' 
When the members of the Whitley Committee discussed 
and recommended the policy of creating industrial councils 
and workshop committees, they could hardly have foreseen 
the piece of good fortune which the war was thus to bring to 
their scheme. There might easily have been a disposition to 
confine these councils to a very narrow set of questions if 
the world had not had this object-lesson before its eyes. And 
these Boards arc more than an object-lesson. They arc a 
precedent. It would clearly be impossible after the war to 
turn round on the Trade Union and say: " Yes, wc agreed 
that you should discuss rations, hours, standard clothes and 
the rest during the war, but you will now shrink into some- 
thing hke one side of a Conciliation Board." The Trade 
Unions have been called in becaus<^ the industry was passing 
through a certain crisis. Peace will not compose that crisis 
or settle of itself all the issues that the emergencies of the wai- 
have raised. We shall not return in a week or a month to 
plentiful supplies and normal conditions. The Trade Unions 
are not going to cease to care about the questions which they 
have helped to solve. They know well enough that thosi; 
questions arise, if not in the same degree, in tlie normal \ii<: 
of. industry. 
The circular letter recently issued by the Minister of Labour 
encourages the hope that the Government Recognise that the 
Industrial Councils will be admirably a<lapted to the task of 
guiding the nation through the difficulties of reconstruction, 
and that these Councils are not to be merely bodies for keeping 
the peace between employer and workman, but the bodies on 
whose shoulders the main burden of demobilisation will fall. 
We may remember, in this connexion, that these Councils 
will start with a great advantage because, during the war, both 
employers 'and Trade Unionists have been acquiring invaluable 
experience. A number of public spirited men in these indus- 
tries have been giving their time to administrative work, and 
the Industrial Council will have the benefit of all that they 
have learnt in surveying the industrv' as a whole with a \'iew 
to helping the Government to form estimates of the resources 
and needs of the future. When we look at one or two <;on- 
crete questions, wc sec that this is the only possible coiirse. 
Work of Demobilisation 
It is obvious that in the actual demobihsation of the army, 
the most useful agents will be the Advisory Committees that 
have helped to regulate enlistment. The more compk'tely 
that problem can be broken up and distributed among such 
bodies, the better. The work of the Labour E.xchangcs 
should be confined to cases that do not come within the province 
of those committees. We may be sure that the Industrial 
Council will turn the Advisory Committees that have .been at 
work into its own sub-committees for demobilisation, and that 
in the case of such industries the work of reinstatement will 
be done by the industries themselves. Similarly, in the case 
of the demobilisation of machinery — the resoration of the 
proper equilibrium of plant — no other body can speak with 
the knowledge and experience that are necessary. 
When these Councils are formed, several leading 
industries will liaxe representati\'e government-. There will 
be representatives of the employers' associations in touch 
with their constituents throughout the industry ; there will 
be representatives of the Trades I'nions in touch with the 
district unions, the shop stewards and thi' workshop com- 
mittees. It will be possible, by means of such bodies, to 
settle all kinds of questions on which, at present, wc talk 
vaguely of the voice of an industry without any true knowledge. 
Take such a question as that of adolescent education. The 
Lewis Committee heard the evidence of a number of manu- 
facturers, one of whom, now a Minister of the Crown, speaking 
in the spirit of 1817, declared that the worsted industry would 
not stand the abolition of half time aud compulsory contiima- 
tion education. To some people that kind of threat sounds 
very impressive. They forget that the industry is there to 
serve the nation on the conditions the nation prescribes. 
The right way, surely, to set about such a reform is to put the 
Industrial Council to work on the problem of adapting the 
industry to a change in the law. If these employers and Trade 
I'nionists know that after a certain time the school leaving 
age is to be raised, and adolescent labour is tcf be reduced 
by one half, they will set their wits to think out the besfc 
method of substituticm. The whole question will be explored ; 
there will be discussion in every mill ; an employer here, a 
workman there will suggest some new contrivance, and the 
industry will reform itself to meet the new conditions. 
Another revolution to be carried out with the aid of such 
Councils is the shortening of hours. It is generally agreed 
that the present day of drudgery must be abolished. The 
workman is going to demand for his own life some of thi; time 
that has hitherto been devoted to the workshop or the mill. 
It was urged in an earlier article that one lesson the war has 
forced on the soldiers' imagination is the truth that it matters 
supremely to a man how he lives, whereas it used to be as- 
sumed that all that mattered was the amount a man can earn. 
The soldier who returns to the mill is going to have some' of 
the daylight for himself. In ]X)int of fact, the reform of the 
factory day is long ovenlue. The last report of the 
chief inspector of factories laid stress on this, quoting the ex- 
perience of individual insp<-ctors. One of these reported ; 
Often we receive cnini)laint of the burden of the twelve 
Iiouis day, and the strain it is to start work at a.m. A 
well-known man in a Lancashire town \vas tclluig me only 
