homemoney to purchasehow And the men are enthusiastic for the new systems their wages are up and labour relations are better. British railway stations exercise an insidious fascination : they are, so to speak, woven into the fabric (and certainly the architectural fabric) of these islands. At Reading station, for example, where working as against waiting time has been stepped up from thirtysix per cent to about sixtyfive per cent of scheduled hours, porters and inspectors were studied by a team of experts for nine months, twentyfour hours a day. The labour force was cut from 140 to 100, but the Commission's readiness to wait on natural wastage before reaping the full benefits of work study will pay dividends in negotiating with local unions elsewhere. However, despite the fact that other stations are being studied Snow Hill, Birmingham, is a successful case some local branches including Oxford have opposed work study, despite the inducement that earnings would almost certainly increase. They fear redundancy. Figures must be approached with caution, but it was estimated in 1959 that the total working population of Great Britain was somewhere around 23,000,000. The membership of nearly 200 unions affiliated to the T.U.G. accounted in the same year for just over a third of that labour force. A further figure of some significance is that half the total working population were women, whereas of the union membership of just over 8,000,000, nearly seveneighths were men. What is formally called 'Industrial Relations' have, then, become a large preoccupation for management and espe 168 The Business of Management Г cially relations with the unions. The chief characteristic of managementunion relations during recent years, and especially since the War, has been industrywide bargaining which may be said to cover about the whole of the manufacturing section of the economy. This has had a curious effect. It has meant that while Ministers of Labour and Union Leaders have assumed the proportions of royalty and film stars so far as press coverage and, indeed, public interest are concerned, management at the domestic level has become impatient of the shop steward and the Unions have severely restricted his responsibilities and authority. Only in a few instances in the iron and steel industry, coal, and some sections of engineering has management seen its role as the task of working out a suitable relationship with union representatives 'on site'. As a result of this the new management ideology towards workers, but more especially so far as unionized labour is concerned, is to improve its relationship by means of more direct management employee communication as distinct from managementunion procedures which are, in any case, so often conditioned by national considerations and nationally recognized personalities. homemoney to purchasehow