The Donovan Report and the White Paper

Just a few days before the 1968 Labour Party Conference opened, the business leaders of the motor industry in a meeting with Barbara Castle and trade union leaders in the industry renewed a demand, first put to the Prime Minister in September 1965, that the Government should introduce direct fines on unofficial strikers under a system of making industry-wide collective agreements legally enforceable. Their concern with unofficial strikes was produced by the fact that, whereas the number of strikes officially sanctioned by unions had remained extremely low since 1956, unofficial action had been increasing substantially over the previous decade. These stoppages were almost always ‘unconstitutional’ – i.e. they took place outside officially negotiated procedure agreements, and although they were characteristically short in duration, they were also often effective in that they were unpredictable and disrupted increasingly integrated production techniques. In industries where this shop floor tactic was used extensively – the docks, shipbuilding, motor-car manufacturing – it had become a strong trade union weapon, the sanction behind the development of shop-steward-led local bargaining, and an important factor in accounting for the phenomen of ‘wage-drift’ whereby worker earnings ran ahead of wage rates. Although the industrial time lost through strikes was a small fraction of that lost through sickness and injury (not to mention unemployment), the latter did not disrupt production in that they were spread throughout the year and the labour force, could be allowed for by the scale of manning and, above all, did not entail a challenge to managerial authority.