The Dominion MONDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1921. THE AUSTRALIAN STRIKE

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 132, 28 February 1921, Page 4

The Dominion MONDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1921. THE AUSTRALIAN STRIKE

In recent days the sight of an ever-increasing fleet of oversea and other ships Jying idly at anchor must have given many people" in Wellington food for troubled thought. As everyone, knows, such, spectacles are not provided without cost. The heavy cost of allowing these ships to “eat their heads oft ig bound sooner or later to fall on all sections of the community* and when it is considered that this expensive hold-up is due simply and solely to the refusal of a body oi waterside workers to give guarantees that they will honestly observe their working agreement, the need of amending the system of industrial regulation which allows such things to happen becomes obvious. If necessity is really the mother .of invention, the people of the Dominion will not muqh longer submit passively to being plundered . and exploited in this fashion. Vitally as the public are concerned, however, public opinion develops slowly in matters of this kind, and the best that can be hoped is, that the spectacle now afforded from day to day in the harbour niay serve such a purpose as an object-lesson that its cost yrill not bo incurred wholly in vain. ’ Much the same is to be said of the greater industrial conflict which has just been .settled in Australia. There, as here, the persecution of the general community by comparatively small sections, of organised labour has been carried to extraordinary lengths,, and never with a more cynical disregard of ordinary fair dealing than in the case of the shipping strike. As regards the attitude and tactics oi the striking unions and in other ways, the affair had much in. common with the present, hold-up in the ports of the Dominion. Its cost, of course, has been enormous, and its direct and indirect effects will fall with severity on the people of the Commonwealth for many mouths to come. Since the middle of December greater mercantile fleets than the one now to be seen in our own harbour have been accumulating in the principal Australian ports, and the cost of keeping these ships idle represents a colossal item to bh added to the direct loss in wages occasioned by the strike —a loss estimated at more than £1,200,000. Such items arc completely overshadowed by the effect of the strike as a set-back to trade and industry in the Commonwealth at a time when they were already making head against serious difficulties Long after the ships have been recommissioned, workers ashore, with their families, will’ suffer hardship as a reault of what the men of the

seafaring unions have done in mere wantonness to intensify conditions of trade depression and unemployment. Ii is r. staggering reflection that tho whole of this loss, waste, and suffering, present and prospective, was occasioned by men who had no grievance to justify their action, and hardly troubled to disguise the fact. The stewards employed on the ships of the Australian inter-State marine decided on December 13 to cease- work over a trivial question, not of working hours per day, but of the period over which these hours might be spread. The action of the stewards, however, though it brought matters to a head and resulted in tho whole of the .ships of the inter-State marine being laid up, appears in retrospect as only an incident in the greater dispute in which it took its place. For many weeks before the stewards took their ill-advised plunge the Australian seamen had been developing the policy of job control —a policy, to use the words of the Commonwealth Prime Minister (Mr. Hughes), “of tackling a few ships at a- time and threatening the owners that unless the union demands are at once conceded the crews will Ire withdrawn and the vessels laid up.” It is evident, as Mr. Hughes observed, that as long as nine-tenths of the union remain at work the strikers on the ships selected for attack can be maintained without difficulty for an indefinite period. But, of course, the position is very different when all the seamen are unemployed. It is on the questions here involved that the strike was fought. The stewards offered a month ago to resume work unconditionally, 'but this did not affect the main dispute. The shipowners took their stand against the policy of job control. Their position was defined in the following terms .in an official statement published in one of the. latest newspapers received by mail from Australia : —

... if the Seamen’s Union and its "members will abide by existing agreements, observe the agreements in other respects and will give ths guarantees asked for that tihey will man the ships under existing agreements, and will attopt constitutional methods in future for rectifying any grievances which they may consider exist from time to time, then there is no other point at issue. In the statement made [earlier] ... it was shown, that the number of men- on inter-State vessels which the ship owners were forced to employ in violation of the existing agreements is very small. The executive of the union-has only to agree to man the vessels without these men, and to give the other assurances asked for. As soon as this has been done the vessels will be recommissioned, and the Seamen’s Union, if it so desires, will be granted a conference, when any matters in dispute as to stokehold manning bo submitted 1 to a manning commitcie under the terms of the agreement.

Although, the cablegrams thus far received in regard to the settlement arc somewhat obscure it appears to follow closely the lines of the foregoing statement. In any case, it is clear that the hold-up of Australian shipping, with the disastrous consequences involved, has extended into a period of nearly eleven weeks solely because the Seamen’s Union refused to abandon the policy of conducting an '-ndlcss series of partial strikes. If the resolute stand made by the shipowners, ensures the abandonment of this policy, the cost, heavy as it is, will be warranted.