The Settlement of Industrial Disputes in Great Britain

Abstract

The Nature of Industrial Disputes Strikes, like all disputes, result from conflict. Conflict arises out of clashing personal or party interests. In the industrial field the conflict occurs between the two parties to industry, those who work for profit and those who work for wages, or their agents. Given the existing economic system, superficial analysis suggests that industrial conflict must on this account continue ad infinitum. Both parties are working for money; what is accorded one in the nature of the case takes away from the other, therefore the conflict resolves itself into a struggle for purchasing power destined eternally to go on between those who supply stored up labor in the form of capital and those who furnish immediate labor by the sweat of their brows. Economic doctors taking this point of view customarily propose one of two solutions, on the one hand suppression of labor organizations and their activities with compulsory arbitration as a last resort, or unrelenting class war culminating in revolution, on the other. But such a simple resolution of industrial conflict completely ignores several factors entering into a condition of conflict, most important of which is the human. Do both parties to industry work exclusively for purchasing power? Does not the fact that no worker can separate his person from his labor; that every employer has invested in his business possessions which he regards as peculiarly his own, create other conflictual issues revolving among workers about the desire for self-respecting conditions of work, recognition of self-organizations and self-determination in connection with their jobs; among employers about the desire to manage their own businesses without interference either from employees or from the government?

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