Lloyd George’s Appeal to Labor

In a speech at Manchester on June 4, and again on June 5, before the employers and workmen of Lancashire, the new Minister of Munitions announced his policy of discontinuing the methods of red tape that had hindered the mobilization of labor for the production of arms and ammunition. His speech at Lancashire appears below in full.

I have come here not for speech but for business, and I shall only indulge in speech to the extent that speaking is the essential preliminary to business. I placed yesterday before a meeting in Manchester my general views of the position, and I have very little to add to what I then said. But I have come here to appeal for the assistance of the men of Liverpool and the surrounding districts.

The situation is a serious one. It is as grave a situation as this country has ever been confronted with. You need have no special knowledge in order to ascertain that yourselves. A careful, intelligent perusal of the published dispatches in the newspapers must have caused you to come to the conclusion that this country is engaging one of the most formidable enemies that it has ever waged war against.

The issues are great, the perils are great, and nothing can pull us through but the united effort of every man in the British Empire. If you look at what our brave fellows are doing at the front you can see the perils there facing them, the trials, the privations, and they are doing it without flinching. ["Hear, hear!"] Never in the history of this country have our men shown greater courage and endurance than they have during this war. They have done all you can expect of mortal man.

We who are comfortable at home, free from privations, free from danger, let us, each of us, do his part as nobly as those heroes of ours are doing it at the front. [Cheers.] It would be horrible for us to think that those who fall fall through our neglect. It would be a still more ghastly reflection to think that those who fell have given their lives in vain through any slackness or selfishness on the part of any one of us in this land.

Yesterday we had a very important gathering of the employers and the representatives of labor in the great engineering firms in Manchester and other parts of this great county. The response made to our appeal was gratifying. Every man there showed a disposition to do all in his power to assist the country to pull through its difficulties triumphantly, and I feel perfectly certain that the same ready response will be given to the same appeal which I am now about to make to the men of Liverpool and the area surrounding it.

What makes Germany a formidable enemy is not merely its preparation for war, it is not merely its organization, potent as that is, but it is the spirit of every class and section of its population. You have only got to read the papers to see that as far as they are concerned they are all of them subordinating everything to the one great national purpose of winning victory for their Fatherland. That is the least we can do in this country for our land. [Cheers.]

I never doubted where ultimate victory would lie, never for a moment. Nor have I ever underestimated the difficulties. But although I have never doubted where victory would rest, all the same I know that victory will come the sooner for recognizing the difficulties there are.

You cannot remove difficulties without looking at them, and you cannot look at difficulties without seeing them, and that is why the business of a Minister is to point them out, and then to appeal to every section of the community to assist the Government in overcoming the obstacles in the way.

Now we want especially the help of those who can contribute to the increase of the munitions, the equipment, and the material of war. We want the help of employers, we want the help of the workers. We want employers and workmen to feel their responsibility in this matter. It is my intention to utilize as much as I possibly can the business brains of the community. I hope to get their assistance. Some of them will be at my elbow in London to advise, to counsel, to guide, to inform and instruct and to direct, but I want the help of the business brains in the localities.

This is no time for the usual methods of doing business with the Government. ["Hear, hear!"] I am assuming that Governments in the past have done their business in the most perfect way. This is not a time for the usual roundabout methods of Government business. ["Hear, hear!"]

We have got to trust business men in the localities to organize for us, to undertake the business in the particular locality on our behalf. We want to suspend during the war not merely trade-union regulations, but some Government regulations, too. ["Hear, hear!"]

We want rifles, we want guns, we want shells, fuses, chemicals, and explosives. There is one thing we want less of than usual, and that is red tape. It takes such a long time to unwind—[laughter]—and we can't spare the time. Therefore, the first thing I am going to ask you to do is to organize for yourselves in this locality, and in every other locality, the engineering resources, for the purpose of assisting the Government. You know best what you can do. I know the resourcefulness of the engineers of this country, I know, as the Lord Mayor has already pointed out, their adaptability. I want you to come together and form your own committee of management. Having done that, organize among yourselves the engineering resources of the locality, with a view to producing the greatest result in the way of helping our gallant forces at the front.

That involves a good deal more confidence and trust than usual. We have no time to go through the same processes of examination, of bargaining, as you get usually in the matter of Government contracts. ["Hear, hear!"]

Whatever is done has got to be done with promptitude. That involves our trusting to the integrity, to the loyalty, to the patriotism of the business men to do their best for us in these localities, and do it on fair terms. That is the first thing I have got to say to the business men of the community. I want you to regard this as your business as well as ours. This is not a Government entering into negotiations with you. You are the Government, you have got an interest in this concern, it is your concern, just as much as it is ours, and I want you to help us.

This is a business for all of us, and we want every business man in the community to give his very best to help the old country through in the great emergency and crisis. [Cheers.] That means that you will, as soon as you possibly can, get your committee of management, and, through that committee of management, organize your district for the purpose of producing such material of war, or such other component parts of any particular material of war, you can help us to produce.

I would make the same appeal to labor. I want them also to feel that this is their business. Should Germany win, God help labor! ["Hear, hear!"] It will come out of it worst of all. The victory of Germany will be the victory of the worst form of autocracy that this world has seen for many a century. There is no section of the community has anything like the interest in the overthrow of this military caste which labor has—["Hear, hear!"]—and the more they realize that, difficulties will vanish, obstacles will go, and bickerings and slackness. We have to get to work as one man to help to win a triumph for democratic free government against the autocratic systems of Germany and Austria. [Cheers.]

Now, I should like to say one or two words beyond what I said yesterday on this particular aspect of the business. I have had the privilege, both yesterday and today, of meeting some of the leading representatives of labor in Manchester and Liverpool. And let me say this: As far as the official representatives of organized labor are concerned, we have had nothing but help. The difficulty has been when you get beyond.

I am not saying a word about trade-union regulations during a period of peace. I have no doubt they were essential safeguards to the protection of labor against what otherwise might have been a serious interference with their rights and with their prospects. But as I have already pointed out to you, Government regulations have to be suspended during the period of the war because they are inapplicable in a time of urgency. The same thing applies to many trade-union regulations and practices. ["Hear, hear!"]

The first I should like to call attention to are those rules which had been set up for very good reasons to make it difficult for purely unsullied men to claim the position and rights of men who have had a training—that is true in every profession.

I happen, my Lord Mayor, to belong to about the strictest trade union in the world—[laughter]—the most jealous trade union in the world. If any unskilled man—and by an unskilled man we mean a man who has not paid our fees—if any man of that sort, however brainy he was, tried to come in and interfere with our business, well, we would soon settle him. [Laughter.] But if during the period of the war there were any particular use for lawyers—[laughter]—if you find that upon lawyers depended the success of the war, and it requires a good deal of imagination; even my Celtic imagination will hardly attain to the exalted height—[more laughter]—but if that were possible for a moment, do you suppose that even the Incorporated Law Society, the greatest and narrowest of all trade unions, could stand in the way of bringing in outside help in order to enable us to get through our work?

Well, now, the same thing applies here. If all the skilled engineers in this country were turned on to produce what is required, if you brought back from the front every engineer who had been recruited, if you worked them to the utmost limits of human endurance, you have not got enough labor even then to produce all we are going to ask you to produce during the next few months. Therefore, we must appeal to the patriotism of the unions of this country to relax these particular rules, in order to eke out, as it were, the skill, to make it go as far as it possibly can go, in order to enable us to turn out the necessary munitions of war to win a real and a speedy triumph for our country in this great struggle.

Now, the same thing applies to the work of women in the factories. There is a good deal of work now done by men, and men only, in this country which is done in France at the present moment in shell factories by women. Why is that? They have not enough men to go round. The men are working as hard as they can, for as long hours as they possibly can support, but in spite of that they would not turn out a sufficient number of shells and other material of war without doling out a good part of the work to women in those factories. Well, now, if there are any trade-union regulations to prevent the possibility of that being done, I hope during the period of war these will be suspended. ["Hear, hear!"]

Now, I am coming to another thing—and I am here to talk quite frankly—it is very much better to do so. ["Hear, hear!"] There must be no deliberate slowing down of work. I have had two or three very painful cases put before me. One was from an arsenal upon which we were absolutely dependent for the material of war. There was a very skilled workman there who worked very hard and who earned a good deal of money. He was doing his duty by the State. He was not merely warned that if he repeated that offense he would be driven out, I am not quite sure that he was not actually driven out.

The same thing happened in another factory. Now, in the period of war this is really intolerable. ["Hear, hear!"] We cannot do with it. We cannot afford it, I say again. There may be reasons, there might be very good reasons, that a policy of that sort should be adopted in the period of peace. I am expressing no opinions about that. I am simply stating the case of this particular emergency, and I am sure that the only thing in this emergency is that everybody should put forward all his strength in order to help the country through. [Cheers.]

Therefore, I do hope that whatever regulation, whatever practice, whatever custom there may be in existence at the present moment which interferes in the slightest degree in the increase of war material, will be suspended during the period of war.

We have given our undertaking as a Government, and that undertaking has been inherited by a new Government. That is that those safeguards which have been established by trade-union action prior to the war will be restored exactly to the position they were when the war is over, in so far as the action of the Government is concerned. We can only ask for a suspension of these regulations during the period of the war, then afterward the same process of discussion will go on between capital and labor as has gone on, I have no doubt, during the last fifty or one hundred years.

Those are two or three of the things which I wanted to put. The lives of our men at the front depend upon the amount of war material we are able to equip them with, success depends upon it, the lives of men depend upon it. Everybody ought to do his best. There is no room for slackers. ["Hear, hear!"] I don't want to get rid of the slackers, I only want to get rid of their slackness—[laughter and cheers]—and we really must.

In this war every country is demanding as a matter of right—not as a matter of appeal—as a matter of right from every one of the citizens, that he should do his best—[cheers]—and that is one of the problems with which we have to deal in this country. It ought to be established as a duty, as one of the essential duties of citizenship, that every man should put his whole strength into helping the country through. [Cheers.] And I don't believe any section of the community would object to it, if it were made a legal right and duty expected of every one. [Cheers.]

I don't know that I have anything further that I want specially to say to you, because I want to get to business as quickly as possible. Sir Frederick Donaldson of Woolwich Arsenal and Sir Percy Girouard are here to answer any question you may put to them on the business of the meeting. They can inform you on the technical side in a way that I can't pretend to. I can only ask you to help us. I know that appeal to you won't be in vain.

We are engaged in the greatest struggle this country has ever been precipitated into. It is no fault of ours. ["Hear, hear!"] We sought peace, we asked for peace, we avoided all the paths that led to war, but we should have forever been dishonored if we had shirked the conflict when it came. [Cheers.]

Harried into it, we are there to champion the deepest, the highest, the greatest interest ever committed to the charge of any nation. Let us equip ourselves in such a way that Great Britain through the war will be still great, and when the war is over it will be a Greater Britain than ever. [Cheers.]