What is wrong with the British iron and steel industry?

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1868556093

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-249484

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: What is wrong with the British iron and steel industry?

Place of publication:: [London

Publisher:: The London Caledonian Press]

Year of publication:: 1931

Scope:: 23 S.

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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[22] m o QO Introduction The public interest displayed with regard to the Statement on the Iron and Steel Industry submitted to representative conferences on May 16th last by the Executive Council of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, has justified its issue in pamphlet form as a means to a wider circulation. The Statement and Resolution were adopted by the Conferences and the proposals received the support of overwhelming majorities at public meetings subsequently held in important industrial centres throughout the country. The Statement expresses the point of view of the workers with regard to the position of a great basic industry and their conception of its place and importance in the national economic life. It is the point of view of those who are not without pride in their craft or calling, who believe in the potentialities of an industry in which they have invested their lives and the wellbeing of those dependent upon them, and who claim that their ability to think, their skill and experience, and their capacity for service should be accorded a true measure- ment of value and of status in any scheme of industrial organisation and development. The Statement is not a political treatise, designed to provide a battle cry for opposing political parties. So far as it calls for the intervention of Parliament it is in the sense only that Parliament is an expression of the will of the people, whose interests it is to see that an industry which in the wider sphere has played so important a part in the advancement of civilisation shall in due measure make its contribution to national progress and the common welfare. The question raised on the front page of this pamphlet is one of the utmost significance, not merely to the share- holders of the multifarious units which comprise this important.industry, but to the nation as a whole, and in what follows the workers through their organisation offer constructive criticism of the direction and control by private enterprise of an industry so essential to the national economy. They assert, in effect, that private enterprise must justify; its claims by actual achievement, rather than by the tradi- tions of nineteenth century individualism or by criticising the workers’ proposals on the assumption that leadership, technical knowledge, inventive genius and the skill and ex- perience of labour cannot be as effectively and as success- fully applied if the ownership and control of the industry is vested in the whole nation, than in a part only. That view has been expressed in its most definite form by the National Federation of Iron & Steel Manufacturers when they state— any form of organisation partaking of the nature of nationalisation must inevitably destroy the competitive power of the industry in world markets and thus involve it in complete collapse, rendering its continued existence only possible by subsidy from the taxpayers.” SN ( : t [2 ; | A 0 < © £ m += © QO ~~ << N~ m ~ Q ~— oo oN oy «0 Ly: DN QQ oo < 2 2 ks Ls 5.3 ~— ea. | © i § © 12 Ie] at uy m oS oN m oN fy ok o- 5 - Mm ¢ 51

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