STRIKES

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 50, 23 November 1926, Page 15

STRIKES

Sir,—lt has been said that "He who makes two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before is a benefactor of his species.” In other words, ho who increases the productiveness of the soil is tho friend of man. So also, on the other hand, he who wilfully destroys or in any way retards this productivity is a public enemy and should be treated as such. To call or promote a strike in the meat trade at the present juncture is a deliberate crime against the whole community. Moat is a perishable commodity even before it is slaughtered; and to stop the meat works at this period is productive of waste, not only to the producer, but to the public at large; and to allow certain persons, not directly interested either in the production or tho subsequent handling of the meat, to call a strike seems to me a gross reflection upon our boasted Constitutional Government.

History teaches on every page that man’s struggle for freedom has ever been a fight against privilege and preference in some form or other; and preference to trades unionists is clearly a reversion to old forms of tyranny and should never have been allowed. With universal suffrage and our Courts of Arbitration and Appeal, the strike should be made absolutely illegal Our cry should, be s Justice, and equity for all and privilege and preference to none. The workers themselves should insist upon it. Things have come to this, that the rank and file of the trades union mqvement, who find the money, have become the mere puppets of a small minority, who live on the game of making industrial trouble, regardless of the cost to the community as a whole, and the sufferings of those least able to bear it. —I am, etc., RUSTICUS. Taihape, November 20.