Foreign News: Importance of Being Ernie

Winston Churchill, looking for big men for the big job of boosting Great Britain’s war-industries output, picked shovel-blunt, beefy Ernest Bevin to be his Minister of Labor. Ever since he had fought Bevin during the General Strike of 1936, it had been plain to Churchill that the strongest man in the British Labor movement was this publicity-shy union official who preferred not to sit in Parliament but wielded enough power to make Laborite Leaders Attlee, Greenwood and Dalton jump when he yanked strings.

“Ernie” Bevin was a callow carter’s apprentice at Bristol when famed Ben Tillett, hero of the Dockers’ Strike of 1889-greatest of the 19 Century in Britain-found him and took him to London to help run his. dock and transport workers’ union, formed in 1911. Rough-tongued old Ben manned the hustings, but Ernie’s organizing, policy-planning and negotiating made the Transport and General Workers’ Union Britain’s biggest, and Ernest Bevin as its tsar the most potent individual outside the Government at the start of World War II.

Chaos was what Ernie Bevin found when he took over the Ministry of Labor from bomb-loud, burrow-slow Ernest Brown, and he lost no time restoring order.

Whipping up munitions production was the big job. He set up a Labor Supply Board of four employer and labor leaders with himself as chairman, revised arbitration methods (each side must accept the referee’s decision as final), outlawed strikes, substituted “rest periods” for vacations. Last week, fresh from a meeting of the Trades Union Congress General Council, which endorsed his steps, Strong Man Ernie forbade other employers to entice labor away from important munitions jobs, ordered workers to stick at their present jobs or take those assigned them by Government Employment Exchanges. He planned to keep wages pegged as a further deterrent to wasteful job-shifting.

With such sweeping measures, Ernie riveted centralized control upon British labor and management, went a long way toward gaining Labor-Socialism’s objective of socialized production. Said Bevin to a conference of building-trade workers last week: “We are producing order out of chaos, and chaos it was when we went in. The system based on monopoly and big business failed to deliver the goods in our hour of trial.” By last week Ernie was able to announce that production in some plants had risen 100% in the past fortnight. But that could be only the beginning. The catastrophe in Flanders had stripped the British forces of nearly all their materiel. A munitions shortage like that of 1915 was a possibility. “I want to shorten the war,” boomed Ernie. “I believe it can be shortened, but nothing but metal will do it.”