Chapter XCVIII: The Best of Intentions.
The New Year was supposed to have seen Austen Chamberlain's government move forward with it's domestic agenda, an area that had been sidelined by the more urgent (and more glamorous) foreign policy and military reform endeavours of the previous year. Technically speaking the government achieved it's aim; several Green Papers were published on the coal industry, health and education while the work of the Conservative Research Department was used as the foundation of a substantial White Paper outlining plans to extend unemployment insurance to the entire workforce and reform pensions. Unfortunately these initiatives were comprehensively overshadowed by the catastrophic mishandling of another policy launched at the same time, an ambitious attempt at industrial reform in the ship building industry.
The episode began the previous year with the decision to base a substantial portion of the Royal Navy at Singapore, the resultant 'Eastern Fleet' was nominally compromised of three battleships, two carriers and several cruiser squadrons and destroyer flotillas in support. This posed a significant logistical challenge for the Admiralty, primarily due to the vast distances involved. To supply the Mediterranean Fleet was a three week round trip for a 10knt tanker, including the time taken to load and unload at both ends, in contrast Singapore was more than a months journey from Portsmouth for such a vessel and was almost a ten week round trip away. Therefore, all else being equal, a warship at Singapore would require triple the number of support vessels of one based in Valletta. Even though stockpiling and other efficiencies could bring that figure down, it was clear to the Admiralty they would either need to charter a large number of commercial vessels, expand the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) or some combination of both to keep the Eastern Fleet supplied in the long term, let alone during a conflict. The choice was made simpler as the RFA was already known to be in need of more modern tonnage to replace it's Great War era relics, the Admiralty only delaying in a successful effort to squeeze more money from the Treasury by classing it as 'extra non-planned expenditure' and thus outside the planned Naval Estimates. It was at this point that the entire process was hijacked by the Lord President of the Council, Lord Beaverbrook, and used as a vehicle for a far more ambitious objective; nothing less than root and branch reform of British shipbuilding.
The problems with the British shipbuilding industry had emerged, or more correctly come to the attention of the government, during the Abyssinian War and the subsequent Chamberlain Report. The report noted that shipbuilding had shown the least improvement in production rates, despite the pressure applied and significant bonuses being on offer productivity had remained broadly similar to pre-war levels, a stark contrast to the other war industries which all had seen a significant leap. The reasons outlined in the report were many, and more would be discovered as the Lord President's team began to study the problem in detail, and spanned a whole range of areas from poor management through to archaic working methods and obstructive unions. While some bright spots were noted, the report flagged up the Clyde yards as the worst offenders, a conclusion that was seen as a serious problem; Clydeside was home to over a dozen yards, including such key concerns as Harland & Wolff, Fairfields and John Brown & Company all of whom had contracts for the next generation of Royal Navy capital ships. The cabinet was therefore easily convinced that the matter needed attention and, given the vital defence interests involved, it was "fit and proper" that government intervened to ensure a beneficial resolution. It is interesting to note the efforts made to convince the cabinet the intervention would be strictly limited, despite the partial conversion to the ideas of Keynesian economics to combat the Depression there was no appetite for extended state intervention or open ended commitments, as had happened with the Coal industry at the start of the decade.
The liner Queen Mary under construction. Laid down as Hull 534 she had been one of the more visible symbols of the Depression afflicting Clyde shipbuilding when her owner, Cunard, had been forced to suspend construction. Though government loans had seen work re-start on her in 1932 Clydeside had continued to suffer until the resumption of Royal Navy capital ship building and the upswing of Empire trade saw order books slowly begin to fill. The deeper problems on the Clyde however remained, while the other great shipbuilding centres on Tyneside and around the Mersey suffered from similar problems, the legacies of the 'Red Clydeside' period had left industrial relations heavily damaged with neither side inclined to trust or co-operation.
The first step in Beaverbrook's plan was to reverse the trend of the previous decade and have the new ships constructed not in private yards under contract, but in the Royal Dockyards where the government could legitimately control the construction process. It was in pursuit of this aim of control that the Rosyth yard was selected, the other Royal Dockyards had existing workforces but Rosyth, having been under care and maintenance since the mid 1920s, had barely a skeleton staff making it a perfect blank sheet of paper, the political benefit of providing employment in a region still struggling to recover was (for once) purely coincidental. Having selected the yard Beaverbrook turned to the ships themselves, drafting in experts from the shipbuilders Cammell Laird and the vast Vickers-Armstrong group to assist on the detail of design and construction. The resultant design drew on the welding expertise of Cammell Laird, who's welding experience stretched from the world's first all welded ship, the Fullagar, up to working on the heavily welded
Ark Royal and the modular assembly knowledge of Vickers-Armstrong, who could call upon the expertise of not only their aviation divisions but also their innovative Palmers Shipbuilders subsidiary. The resulting designs, though fairly conventional in size and appearance, were for fully welded diesel engined motor vessels optimised for assembly line construction, a stark change from the riveted, assembled on the slip, triple expansion engined steam ships they would be replacing in RFA service.
Having managed to avoid serious opposition to that point, bar the inevitable complaints of the coal lobby in Parliament who objected to any naval vessel that wasn't coal powered, the problems for the scheme began when recruitment and mobilisation began in Rosyth, bringing the government into direct confrontation with the unions. To explain why the Rosyth scheme was so fiercely opposed it is first necessary to briefly explain the standard system in place at most other yards. A typical Clydeside yard would have in the region of 40 to 50 'Craft' unions, each representing an individual trade such as fitters or boiler makers, almost all of which worked together under an umbrella organisation, the United Society of Boilermakers and Iron and Steel Shipbuilders (USBISS). For an employers point of view this was the worst possible combination, 50 different groups to bargain with made negotiations incredibly time consuming, while the unions co-operation meant a strike by one group could (and often did) result in all 50 going out on strike at once. With such power it is hardly surprising the unions had amassed considerable concessions, most crucially very strict demarcation of work (a hull riveter would not work on the superstructure, even if the alternative was doing nothing) and complete control of the training of all 'craft' staff, which in practice meant almost the entire workforce. That last concession was perhaps the most crucial, from the moment a new apprentice was hired he would become part of the union structure, indeed as union membership was compulsory for all apprentices the union had an effective veto over staff recruitment and promotion. More importantly the unions could, and did, artificially restrict the labour market, ensuring that only the bare minimum of new staff were trained to keep supply low and their wages high.
The combination of a shortage of staff and strict demarcation between roles limited the ability of a yard to speed up production, the system had so little flexibility it only had one speed. More importantly it stifled innovation, any change had to be agreed by dozens of groups and could not involve changing the deployment of the work force for fear of upsetting the delicate balance. Quite aside from these problems the system also ensured that a shipyards workforce was indifferent to management, correctly realising that keeping the union hierarchy happy was far more important for keeping a job and progressing up the ladder. The final problem identified was perhaps the most corrosive to change and control, the system left almost all practical knowledge resting with the unions and not management, in too many yards management just was not capable of supervising and assessing work (or coming up with new ways to work) as they lacked the skills and knowledge. Taken together it was a recipe for stagnation, but a stagnation that favoured the unions and their members, provided of course the clients kept coming and didn't consider overseas yards, a possibility that more and more clients were pondering as the price premium of a Clyde built ship continued to rise.
With this background it is obvious why the Rosyth approach was so controversial. Instead of the dozens of different trades the yard only hired people for generic skills, for instance the scores of carefully demarcated riveter grades were replaced with just a single grade of welder, all of whom were expected to work anywhere on the site as needed. Worse was to come as the apprenticeship system was swept away and replaced with in-house training, a body blow to the power of the union but an entirely sensible decision. A riveter could spend anything up to two years under apprenticeship before emerging on the bottom rung and still needing years of experience before becoming fully qualified; it was estimated an experienced team was over four time faster then a team of just qualified apprentices. In stark contrast a welder could be trained in a couple of months in a classroom/workshop and then go straight to work being something like 90% as good as a man with years of experience, hardly a 'skilled trade' that required years of mentioning and learning on the job. Despite these colossal changes and challenges to the status quo, Beaverbrook and his team were utterly shocked by the scale of the opposition, after all pay and conditions were generous and union organisers were (grudgingly) welcomed and accepted on site. It appears that based on their experience in the aircraft industry, on which they had modelled a great deal of their approach, they believed that these measures would be enough to get the scheme accepted, in this belief they would be comprehensively disappointed.
It is one of the ironies of the national ship building strike that the yard at it's centre, Rosyth, was entirely unaffected by it. After USBISS refused to even visit the site, one of the main aims of the strike was to see it closed and the work given to a 'traditional' yard, the workforce had unionised with the Transport and General Worker's Union (TGWU), slotting into the metalworking trade group with ease. Given the very lose structure of the TGWU, and the bad blood between their metal working members and the boilermakers unions, this was inevitable as the always ambitious TGWU sought to extend it's scope at the expense of the 'arrogant' boilermakers. Unsurprisingly the TGWU did not call a strike in sympathy, there was no appetite for a strike at Rosyth itself while it was unlikely the rest of the membership would have listened to a strike under the circumstances; the TGWU was never the most fraternal union, except when it came to absorbing smaller unions.
In a most unfortunate coincidence the strike was called on the same day that Beaverbrook announced his final twist, a 'race' between the new Rosyth yard and a traditional yard. An identical design would be put out to contract for work in a private yard and the cost and time taken would be presented to the House for comparison. A typically showy gesture this was probably just an attempt to highlight Beaverbrooks' work and should not be taken as an ambition to bring all ship building back into the Royal Dockyards, though with Beaverbrook one can never be certain quite how far his scheming extended. In any event the lesson most dockyard managers drew was a confirmation of their wisdom in not confronting the unions, combined with a deep dislike of Beaverbrook for provoking a national strike. Indeed the depth of union opposition surprised even veteran shipbuilding experts, this was due to the USBISS' executive deciding to make the issue a 'line in the sand' over control of welding. This was a long sighted decision by the union, all across the country welding was supplanting riveting as technology advanced and techniques improved, victory was therefore essential to ensure they maintained their stranglehold over management even as technology changed.
Coming as an almost complete surprise to the government the first reaction was one of confusion and a hasty cabinet meeting, so the cabinet could find out exactly what 'The Beaver' had done to get them into the mess. The initial relief that the strike was peaceful, and that other unions were not getting involved, was soon replaced by discomfort as it became apparent quite how serious the problem was. With almost all shipbuilding stopped, and countless other industries suffering bottlenecks and slow downs, the impact on the national economy could not be ignored while the political fall out was if anything worse. The only positive was that the press was broadly supportive, particularly the Beaverbrook papers for obvious reasons, though this was as much due to confusion over the strike as anything else; the issues were fairly obscure except to those intimately involved and the workers pay and conditions were never actually an issue, consequently most editors struggled to get a grip on the issue as it didn't fit the conventional strike storyline.
While the cabinet was quickly able to agree they couldn't back down, backing down would severely damage the government's credibility and authority, a solution proved more elusive. There were only two outcomes, either the Rosyth yard stayed open or the government acquiesced to the union demands and returned it to mothballs, there was no obvious third option. Just to make matters that little bit worse for the government the Miners' Federation of Great Britain decided to take advantage of the situation to put the boot in, indicating it's complete disagreement with the Green Paper on coal mining and promising strike action should the subsidies be withdrawn. In the face of these problems Chamberlain's domestic agenda was soon abandoned, discarded as his government tried to extract itself from the mess of industrial conflict it found itself in.
Notes:
Well that's not gone well, well I hope not anyway. Last time I thought an update was bad for Britain I was told it was actually a triumph, so I'm a little wary of declaring something to be bad news. It's also considerably longer than I first thought, who knew welding could be so (hopefully) interesting?
The problems with ship building were noticed in OTL but a little later, the Beaver tried to fix it them in 1940/41 with similar methods as in the update, but was knocked back for a variety of reasons not least an accurate fear over Union opposition delaying war time construction. This time round though the government is a bit too confident and he's a bit more senior so he gets his chance and uses it to charges straight into trouble.
The union rules and figures are true, they did dominate the yards, management were that inept and riveting is, despite appearances, very hard to get the hang of and do quickly where as welding is exceptionally easy to pick up. However in OTL the unions managed to grab welding and, in ship building at least, it became a 'craft' with all the rules and delays that implies. Hence why Britain was still riveting ships well into the late 1950s when almost everyone else had stopped at least a decade before, one of the many reasons for it's decades long decline.
Cammell Laird were indeed the nearest Britain had to ship welding experts and Vickers (along with most, but not all, the competition) did do modular construction for aircraft. Palmers Shipbuilding are an odd one, their Jarrow yard did indeed use modular construction as early as the 1920 to tie pre-made sections together, sadly they used rivets not welding so didn't get the full benefit of the system and were brought by Vickers during the depths of the Depression. The Royal Dockyards were still building the occasional ship at the time, however by the 1930s something like 90%+ of new contracts went to private yards while the Royal Dockyards concentrated on repairs and refits.
Game Effects: Beside the obvious dissent I've added a long serial of convoys and pushed it, along with everything else naval, to the bottom of the build queue. As I've far, far too much stuff in the queue to start with they are therefore all red, nicely simulating the effect of the strike.