両大戦間期におけるインペリアル・ケミカル・インダストリーズ社の体系的労務政策の展開と福利厚生の役割

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to identify the features of the interwar labour policy of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. (I.C.I.) by studying the connection between labour policy and welfare programmes.Industrial welfare was important for I.C.I., which possessed about 70 factories and some 40, 000 employees through amalgamation, as a labour strategy to stabilise industrial relations by reducing employment insecurity and fostering worker loyalty.The I.C.I. welfare schemes underwent a conversion from paternalistic benefits based on unitary ideals, such as personal contact between employers and employees, into systematic benefits based on formal rules, such as a joint contributory scheme. This change was made clear by analysing the systematisation of I.C.I. welfare schemes between the early period when Sir Alfred Mond, the first chairman, needed to lay the foundations for the new company and the latter period when Sir Harry McGowan, the second chairman, had to implement business restructuring by laying off and reshuffling surplus workers after the Great Depression.In the latter period, consequently, the square deal of all I.C.I. workers engaged in various trades in each factory indicated mechanistic unification of industrial relations, which was realised by introducing more comprehensive and systematic welfare programmes. In this respect, I.C.I. welfare programmes functioned effectively as a means to consolidate industrial relations.My conclusion includes the important implication that the role of systematic welfare schemes as a centralised labour policy was to facilitate labour turnover between subsidiary factories and to promote or supplement business restructuring with lay-offs and replacement of redundant labour in the early 1930s, by constructing comprehensive welfare programmes as the safety net in situations where the predecessor and conventional administrations of the constituent companies of I.C.I. remained to some extent.