NEMESIS FOR DARWIN LABOURITES.

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16165, 20 March 1918, Page 4

NEMESIS FOR DARWIN LABOURITES.

(frosi our own correspondent.) SYDNEY, March 13. Nemesis Las at last overtaken the Labour unions of I>arwin. "And not before due time" is the general comment in this country. The average Australian, accustomed as he is to the j insatiable Itolshevilc demands of the Labour virions, had to admit that conditions at Darwin wore "over the fence.'' Darwin is notorious as the place ; where hours are shorter, wages higher, and unions more irreconcilablc than anywhere else in the Commonwealth. The Northern Territory is a place where evervthing is run and done by the State, and as the average union is deeply imbued with the idea that it is the State, the unions in Danvin practically took upon, themselves the duty of running tho whole Territory. Conditions were so intolerable that the companies wherever possible would not_ allow then ships 1 o call there. A case is on rccoid of tho waterside workers refusing to unload a ship because the captain had had occasion to speak harshly of one or their members. The shipping company retaliated on the community by sending tho bhip on her voyage, carrying some hundreds of tons of Darwin goods. Now the chief industry of Darwin is the frozen meat industry, the great meat works, to treat the herds which have been built up in the interior in the last lew years have been completed recently. Darwin has enjoyed a couplo rf f years of prosperity while these works were being buiit, and it was looking forward -"to the imminent commencement of the killing period as the introduction to even happier times. Jhe powerful A.W.U. (Australian \Vorkers Union), which has had affairs all its own way for so long, confidently opened negotiations with the meat company, and demanded a rate far in _ excess of thai, ruling anywhere else. Negotiations, by mutual consent, took place in Brisbane, and neither side seemed prepared to make concessions. Then, like a bomb, came the meat company's decision not to open the works this year—just tho bald announcement," and nothing more. But it is obvious that the powerful interests represented by these, meat works are not prepared to carry on under tho intolerable conditions of the _ Darwm A.W.U., and arc going to end it._ It is going to mean disaster to Darwin unless the unionists capitulate very quickly, for there are many hundreds of it.en thero who will be out of work.

No one loves the powerful and unscrupulous meat companies of this country, and m any other circumstances public sympathy would be against them; but in this case, the arrogant and unreasonable unionists have aroused such antagonism everywhere that their complete defeat will be welcomed as a good service to the Territory.