The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

FOREWORD xii

project of setting up anything in the nature of an Industrial Council or Parliament of Industry is linked up with the problem of relationship between employers and workers. In the background lies the idea that industrial warfare is to be averted by means of discussion between the representatives of employers and workpeople and accordingly they have tended almost without exception to think of their Council or Parliament as the arena of such debate rather than as an organ of economic control.

That conception dominates to some extent the proposals recommended by the Melchett-T.U.C. Conference on Industrial Reorganisation and Industrial Relations for the setting up of a National Industrial Council with conciliation machinery for the settlement of industrial disputes. The approach is here also from the point of view of two-party discussions on matters of policy and organisation affecting industry as a whole. Economic planning and co-ordination of industry are not conspicuously and definitely the functions of the projected National Industrial Council contemplated by the Melchett-T.U.C. Conference. The resulting creation, if it had been brought into existence, would have resembled that contemplated by the joint conference of 1g1g9—that is to say it would have been in the main a debating chamber in which the representatives of two parties in industry (employers and workpeople) would discuss their differences arising out of the conduct of industry as a whole