the chairmanship of Sir Stephenson Kent, K.C.B., in 1918. The result of these two committees was the Act of 1919, which rigidly enforced the restitution of practices.
Perhaps it would not be unfair to say that this Act was unneces- sary, and that in so far as effective safeguards were required, they were provided by the original Acts. But circumstances snowed that complete restitution was in fact impracticable, and the trade unions realized that, if this were so, they were entitled to adequate compensation, which the further Act would secure for them.
(4) Full Value for Hours Worked. This aspect of labour reg- ulation may be regarded under the three main heads: (a) the prevention of strikes and lockouts; (b) regulation of workshop discipline and hours through the Munitions Acts and partic- ularly through munitions tribunals; and (c) the improvement of working conditions, under which is included the welfare work and the provision of housing.
It is not necessary here to deal with the original labour truce, the appointment of the committee on production, the provisions of the Munitions of War Acts and the Defence of the J* VI * Realm Regulations, making strikes and lockouts and strikes. incitements thereto offences, and the work of the general munitions tribunals set up by the Munitions of War Acts to deal with strikers or employers guilty of lockouts. It is sufficient to say that any attempt to make a full use of available labour without regulation of strikes and lockouts is obviously doomed to failure, and therefore in so far as the methods adopted directly to prevent strikes and lockouts were successful an important aspect of labour regulation was ade- quately handled. But experience ^showed that it was not in the machinery for preventing disputes, so much as in the spirit operating among employers and workers, that the best security against industrial disputes lies. In the earliest days of the war, when the sense of national danger and of patriotism was at its highest, no machinery was devised or required. In the later years of the war, when continuous strain, disappointment, anxiety, and, above all, reflexion on what appeared to the workers were the huge profits made out of the war by employers, had strained tempers, elaborate machinery could not prevent such stoppages as the dilution strike of May 1917, or the Coventry " embargo " strike of 1918. No machinery, however perfect, can cure a disease of the spirit, and the ultimate sanction of all anti-strike legislation must be the willingness of those affected by it to accept Us terms. Machinery without the right direction of labour policy, and without skilful officers in charge of the detailed working, would inevitably break down. The committee on production of itself great and respected machine as it was would have been ineffective but for the steady patriotism of both employers and workpeople as a whole, and for the un- remitting and completely unrecognized efforts first of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade, then of the Ministry of Munitions, and finally of that Ministry, the Ministry of Labour and the Shipyard Labour Department of the Admiralty, to prove to the workers that whatever might be demanded of them was only demanded in the national interest. As prevention is better than cure, so conciliation is better than arbitration. Doctors are required, and arbitrators are vital, but it is the wise direction of policy that makes the task of the arbitrator a possible one. And, when full account is taken of the many mistakes that were made, the work of the conciliating depart- ments played no small part in seeing that the available labour produced the munitions which won the " engineers' " war.
The munitions tribunals were set up by the first Munitions of War Act, 1915. They represented a compromise between in- dustrial compulsion and voluntarism. Grave com- e'. P Iaint s had been made that one of the principal causes of failure to produce the required output of munitions was the bad time-keeping both in shipyards and engineering establishments. Various causes for this were ascribed, most prominent among them being high wages and drunkenness. Acute controversy was aroused by allegations and counter- allegations, and an official enquiry was instituted in 1915, the results of which were presented in a paper laid before Parliament on May i 1915, entitled " Report and Statistics of Bad Time
Kept in Shipbuilding, Munitions and Transport Areas." The paper, though inconclusive, tended to show that, whatever the causes, there was in some areas room for improvement.
When, therefore, the first Munitions of War Act was intro- duced, with a general scheme for regulating labour, this aspect of the question could not be shelved. Nor could it be allowed to solve itself by the ordinary economic checks of peace-time. In peace-time the remedy for bad time-keeping, and generally of ineffective workmanship, is dismissal. With an acute shortage of labour, dismissal can only be resorted to in extreme cases. It was accordingly decided to make deliberately inefficient workmanship an offence by Section 4 (5) of the Munitions of War Act, 1915, which was as follows:
" The employer and every person employed in the establishment shall comply with any regulations made applicable to that estab- lishment by the Minister of Munitions with respect to the general ordering of work in the establishment with a view to attaining and maintaining a proper standard of efficiency and with respect to the due observance of the rules of the establishment.
"If the employer or any person so employed acts in contravention of, or fails to comply with, any such regulation, that employer or person shall be guilty of an offence under this Act."
The offence thus created was a new one in law, and the first point to determine was whether it should be tried in the ordinary courts. After discussion in Parliament it was decided to set up munitions tribunals (Section 15, Ministry of War Act, 1915) of two classes known respectively as general and local tribunals to deal with all new offences created by the Munitions of War Act and with appeals in respect of leaving certificates under Section 7. The essential features of the tribunals were:
(i.) The fact that the independent chairman was assisted by two assessors one employer and one workman. Originally the assessors were merely advisory, but they were made a part of the court by the Act of 1916, which also provided for a woman assessor in cases affecting women.
(ii.) The comparative informality and the cheapness of their proceedings. These two points were emphasized in the munitions tribunals' rules governing the procedure of the tribunals. These rules provided first for the exceedingly low fees, and secondly that lawyers could not appear before the local tribunals, though repre- sentatives of the workmen could.
Like so many other of the instruments devised to meet war emergencies, the tribunals worked well, but not in the direction anticipated. It was expected in the first place that the
i -i- i -i_ i v t_ j i .!_ Munitions
general munitions tribunals, which were to deal with Tribunals. strikes and lockouts and employers' offences, would play a predominant part. The fact, however, was that except for six or seven notorious cases, such as the trial of the strikers at Fairfield's, at Glasgow, this class of tribunal rapidly receded into the background. For experience showed that actual prosecutions for the offence of striking had little result. To begin with, it was impracticable to lodge complaints against 10,000 men, and it was invidious to select among the offenders. In the second place, when imprisonment for failure to pay fines had been aboMshed by the Act of 1916, there was no certainty of recovery. And finally, even if recovery was possible, the individual did not suffer, since levies could always be raised to pay the fine. Indeed, so far as legal action in respect of strikes was effective it was the Defence of the Realm Act with its heavy penalties against incitement rather than the Munitions Acts that operated. But, though the general munitions tribunals were in fact little used yet none the less their existence was of great deterrent value.
So far as the local tribunals were concerned, their work in respect of workshop discipline formed in volume at any rate as time went on the lesser part of their heavy duties. They were worked hard, indeed sometimes almost overwhelmed, but their principal work consisted, so long as the leaving certificates re- mained, in dealing with appeals, and after their abolition with claims for failure to give notice and with questions arising upon claims for payment of wages under the orders issued by the Minis- ter of Munitions under the powers vested in him by the Mu- nitions Acts. So complex and difficult were these questions, and so liable to different interpretations by the fifty or sixty tri- bunals in existence, that it was found necessary under the Act of 1916 to provide for an appeal to the High Court in England
