SOME STRIKE LESSONS.

Press, Volume L, Issue 14888, 30 January 1914, Page 6

SOME STRIKE LESSONS.

Very full accounts are given in tho latest English, papers to hand of the strike, of the municipal employees in Leeds last month. The ostensible reason for the strike was the demand of an increase of 2s per week , in the wages of every municipal and 4500' men came out when the Corporation refused to surrender to a peremptory notice to grant the increase inside three days. The strikers aimed

at coercing the city by etopping most of the services essential to the health and convenience of the people—the water supply, lighting, heating, the sanitary services, and even the disposal of the dead. The city met this challenge in the most spirited fashion. The Corporation stood firm, and the citizens, thus assured that their interests would not be betrayed, united to restore the interrupted services, and smashed the strike in less than a week. The people of this country have had personal experience of a syndicalist war on the community, and accordingly we need not enlarge upon the way in which the instinct of self-preservation revealed itself in the public of Leeds, but there is much to interest New Zealanders in the comments of some of the leading London journals. The "Morning Post" saw a resemblance, in more than one important particular, between the Leeds 6trike and the threat of the Post Office servants to go on strike in order to secure the granting of their demands for considerably higher pay. These two affairs, the "Post" pointed out, "show "the political, economic, and social "dangers of our rapidly increasing ' ; public services." To have a great army of postal servants threatening to strike unless the Government granted their demands was, it said, a, sufficiently serious evil, but the" evil would be very much greater if the railways were nationalised. The Socialists speak of nationalisation as a sovereign epecific for industrial disorders, but we have seen in this country that employees of the State are willing, not merely to strike because they have grievances:, but to strike in sympathy with a syndicalist outbreak in another part of the country and in another trade. The "Morning Post" considers it "inevitable that in a Socialist State " the great Trade Unions would endea"vour to use their power to extract '■' from the State an undue chare of the "national profits at the expense of the ''smaller trades. The result would be " that, to avoid national bankruptcy, " strikes against the State would have "to be made a penal offence." A more immediate danger is the possibility that for the sake of obtaining, the support of organised labour an unscrupulous arid opportunist . Government may sacrifice the national interest. The Leeds strike and the action of tie postal employees are of importance, also, as showing that organised labour has, gone a long way towards cancelling the distinction which it used to make between public and private employment. But the real lesson for New Zealand is the supreme importance of having in control of the general-and local government men who will not be intimidated by aggressive syndicalism. Infinite harm would have been,done had' the Massey Government taken the weak line which the Opposition would have liked them to take. The surrender of the Wellington City Council during the tramway strike two years ago was largely due to. the activities of the "Liberals" on the Council, and was bitterly resented by a majority of the citizens. That exhibition of weakness in.the controlling authority contributed ■ not * a little towards the growth of the 'syndicalist movement, and it contributed more than a little towards the intense hardness with, which the Wellington public set its face against the watersiders' strike.