About 150 people, many of them official delegates, were present at 2.30 pem. on Saturday, 8th May, at the start of this remarkable conference on workerst control in industry. Through the offices of the L.C.S., the conference organisers had been able to book a number of unexpectedly sumptious rooms in the rather chic hotel near Euston, which the society owns; and the elegantly smart surfaces of the premises were in interesting contrast with the blunt and earthy nature of much of the audien® and most of the proceedings.
Walter Kendall and Richard Fletcher, representing the Voice of the Unions chain of newspapers, opened the proceedings with conference arrangements. Saturday was to be almost entirely devoted to seminaral discussion of Steel, Docks, Mines, Co-operative Movement, Co-ownership and (unsCchenatically but necessarily) Incomes Policy. At 3. o'clock, when the Conference divided for these discussions, it became apparent how necessary 4 discussion on incomes policy really was when approximately one in three of the people present opted for that seminar. Not even steel, of immediate and topical import, could match it for interest.
The seminars lasted for one hour, in view of many much too short @ time to get one's teeth in. I can only say that the incomes policy group of which I was a member got through a good deal of biting of one sort and another during the sixty minutes, though few issues were chewed right through.
At 4.15 peme the conference reconvened for reports back from the groups! rapporteurs. The chanciness of this procedure was reflected in the huge range of quality between one report and the other; from, for. example, one dull, rambling and often incoherent contribution, to the crisp, direct, authoritative and very moving summary from a docker. On the whole, the standand of reporting back was agreeably high and there were few complaints of distortion or misrepresentation. Not all of the seminars, however, seemed to have achieved the same level of analysis, In general, to judge from the, reports, Docks and Steel would seem to have produced the most detailed and/sightful discussions, while Coal in particular afforded little by way of recommendation or analysis. Significantly, both the steel industry and the docks have their own Voice, in which this kind of debate has been steadily developed over a period of time,
Such clashes as might have been anticipated came predictably over incomes policy, where the principal contenders for the conference's attention were Ken Coates' "Open the Books" thesis, Barratt-Brown's and John Hughes! "Make Prices our Target" line, and a curiously shapeless argument from Tony Cliffe and other "International Socialists" about the need to reject everything in favour of shopfloor negotiation for higher wages and better conditions. Throughout the involved and very honest discussions that ensued, there was a felt need for some unifying approach on incomes policy but very little sense that the conference was providing one. One felt at the end that the June conference at Manchester might usefully devote one of its sessions to the same problem,
Industrial democracy school: the first day continued/
One indication of the importance of the conference was th
Ian Mikardo chose it at which to make his attack on George Son hatte
of the Steel White Paper. His statements were sufficiently reported at the
time to require no reiteration here, i i
Pro was his contribution to the d
e steel industry, Havinz listened with scrupulous attention to the
of Frank Ward on behalf of the Steel Geeitnar. “be spoke for almost weet ae
hour on the profound shortcomings of the White Paper, and in particular the
failure in imagination by the Government in accepting the Morrisonian notion
of public ownership as a Satisfactory basis for nationalising steel,
"Nationalised industries spawned in the image of privately owned limited
liability companies, forced to use their profit-and-loss account as the
limiting factor on all their activities, are not a socialist answer to the
problem of public ownership", he Said. It's a pity the national press
didn't stay to hear him; or didn't take away with them the really excellent
paper produced by the Sheffield Group on which most of the discussion on
steel (including Ian Mikardo's) was based,
This was a remarkable first day. The chairmants opening words on the
need to achieve some sort of constructive harmony within which conflicts
of ideas and values could be fruitfully discussed had been followed all
down the line. From all the Signs, few left the Ambassadors Hotel on
Saturday evening without feeling that something useful and significant had
happened that afternoon, ;