Munitions of War Act

On 2 July 1915 the Munitions of War Act received royal assent. Its provisions came into force the same day. The Act placed the British armaments industry under state control, banned strikes and lock-outs in it, and required disputes between workers and employers to be settled by compulsory arbitration. Parliament passed it at express speed. The House of Commons finished work on the bill in the early hours of 2 July, and the House of Lords passed it that same afternoon, at a single sitting, after which royal assent was announced in both Houses.

The shell crisis and the Treasury Agreement

The Act was a response to the crisis that in May had brought down the purely Liberal government. The British Army in France was short of shells, and the factories were short of skilled workers, because many of them had enlisted. Machines in great works such as Vickers and Armstrong stood idle. Production was also held back by trade union rules, won over many years, that laid down who could do what work.

As early as March 1915 the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, had tried to settle the matter amicably. On 17 March he invited the union leaders to the Treasury. The so-called Treasury Agreement reached there provided that for the duration of the war unskilled workers would be admitted to skilled work, arbitration would replace strikes and manufacturers’ profits would be limited. The agreement, however, remained largely on paper. The workers did not want to give up their rights until the government limited the employers’ profits, and negotiations with the armaments firms on the matter came to nothing.

Lloyd George, by now Minister of Munitions, introduced the bill in the House of Commons on 23 June. He had agreed its content beforehand with representatives of the trade unions. He also warned that if labour ran short, compulsion would be unavoidable. The trade unionists asked for seven days to gather volunteers. Lord George Curzon, who presented the Act to the Lords on 2 July, called it “a sort of tripartite treaty between the Government, the employers and the employed”.

What the Act provided

Workers in the armaments industry lost the right to strike, and disputes were to go to existing conciliation boards or to one of three arbitration tribunals. Industry was not uniform, however. The miners, the cotton workers and the railwaymen refused to join the agreement, because they had long distrusted compulsory arbitration and had their own ways of settling disputes. The government gave way. Their industries could be brought under the Act only by royal proclamation, should the existing machinery fail.

The most important novelty was the controlled establishments. Factories working for the state could be placed under the control of the Minister of Munitions. Their net profit could not exceed the average of the last two years before the war by more than one fifth, and the surplus went to the Exchequer. The owners could not change wages without the minister’s consent, nor poach each other’s workers. In return, trade union rules restricting output were suspended in controlled establishments for the duration of the war. The Act expressly promised that they would be restored after the war.

A worker who left munitions work could not find employment elsewhere for six weeks unless he had a leaving certificate from his former employer or from a tribunal. Discipline in the factories, that is lateness, absenteeism, drunkenness and disobedience, was to be policed by munitions tribunals. They were chaired by a person appointed by the minister, and representatives of employers and workers also sat on them. Breaches of the rules were punishable by fines. The Act also gave a legal basis to the munitions volunteers. Skilled workers enrolled at more than 200 offices organised by the local authorities and for six months remained at the disposal of the ministry, which could send them to work anywhere in the country. According to Curzon, more than 46,000 people enrolled in the first week.

The first test

The Act soon faced its first test. On 13 July the government issued a proclamation that brought the coalfield of South Wales under its provisions. Taking part in a strike without arbitration thereby became an offence there. The miners stopped work anyway on 15 July, and in the following days, according to contemporary reports, about 200,000 men were idle in the pits. Fining so vast a number of people proved impracticable. Members of the government, among them Lloyd George, went to Cardiff, and around 21 July the strike ended with most of the miners’ demands being accepted.

Even so, the Act remained in force until the end of the war and was amended in the following years. Particularly hated were the leaving certificates, which tied a worker to a single employer. They gave rise to the radical shop stewards’ movement in the works on the Clyde in Glasgow. In keeping with the promise of 1915, the pre-war working rules were restored in 1919 by a separate Act.