Inequalities at the Workplace

Inequality of status and treatment between manual and non-manual workers remains an indefensible relic of Britain’s industrial system. The stigma of being a worker by hand is far more tenacious in this country than perhaps almost anywhere else in the western industrialised world. Moves towards a harmonisation of conditions of service, bringing the shop-floor into line with the office, have begun only recently in any systematic way. A number of manual trade unions, notably the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, have started to make the issue a major bargaining priority after a long period of neglect and shop-floor indifference. The present depression is hardly the best of times to achieve any lasting breakthrough towards work-place equality, but a growing number of employers recognise the justice of the demand and they are making belated efforts to remedy the injustice. White-collar staff — in many cases well-organised in unions — can be expected to press for new privileges to differentiate themselves from manual workers. Some white-collar unions are even quite ready to appeal openly to snobbery and status in their recruitment drives, while they continue to claim they stand on the left of the Labour movement. Until now, not enough manual workers have been either upset or angry at the discrimination they have suffered at work and neither their unions nor the Labour party have made any conscious effort to highlight the issue or launch a radical policy to eradicate its worst abuses.