NOT DISLOYAL.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 828, 28 May 1910, Page 3

NOT DISLOYAL.

AUCKLAND LABOUR INCIDENT,

VIEWS OF MR. E. J. CAREY

With tho object of obtaining an indication of the views hold in local Labour circles concerning the censure which the Auckland Trades and Labour Council has passed upon Sir. A. Rosser, a Dominion reporter yesterday waited upon Mr. E. J. Carey. As recorded in The Dominion yesterday, Mr. Bosser had incurred the displeasure of the Trades Council in the northern city by sending, as president of the Dominion Executive of the Trades and Labour Council, a telegram of condolence on the death of King Edward, without first consulting the executive. The Trades Council had passed a motion requesting him to resign his office.

Mr .Carey expressed the opinion that the suggestion that tho motion of censure passed on Mr. A. Hosser by the Auckland Trades Couucil disclosed, a spirit of disloyalty on tho_part of the Auckland unions was a very unfair one. "As a class the workers in this country,'' he continued, "are just as loyal as any other section of tho community, and they have always proved so on any occasion calling for any display of loyalty. In local Labour circles on all sides, when the news of the King's death 'reached here, it was received with genuine expressions of regret. Tho censure motion was never intended to convey the impression that delegates voting for it took ■ exception to the contents of the telegram sent by Mr. Arthur Rosser. What delegates resented, and, in my opinion, which thoy had a perfect right to resent, was the action of Mr. Rosser in sending a message on behalf of th'o executive, without first having consulted the executive. The fact that Mr. Rosser sent a former telegram on his own initiative and escaped censure for so doing does not alter the sense of the present situation; Evidently the Auckland Council thought the time ripe to insist on its executive officer making himself amenablo to the general rule of procedure always insisted upon in all Labour bodies. I repeat it is unfair to attempt to construe their action as an evidence of disloyalty on the part of delegates. "Labour men everywhere have respect for the late.King Edward, both as a man and a monarch. Their' loyalty is not measured by their pocket. It is a more genuine loyalty than that of a certain class of employer, who while giving'his apprentices a holiday as an outside show of loyalty descends to stopping the pay of those apprentices, so as to cover the trifling loss incurred. Again, contrast the loyalty of the Federal -Labour Government with that of, say, the Wade Government. To-day's cable messages report that l there is a strike of railway workers in New South Wales because of tho stoppage of a day's pay on tho day of the King's funeral. Mr. Fisher boldly declared that no Federal employee would lose his pay because of the holiday."