WAGE REDUCTIONS

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 30, 5 February 1931, Page 18

WAGE REDUCTIONS

UNEMPLOYMENT IN PRE- . • FERENCE

(From "The Post's" Representative.) .;" SYDNEY, 29th January. ; No one, not even the gi'eat majority j of employers, objects to unionism on sane, sound lines, as an accepted,principle of Australian industrial life. But when; it openly,.and with its eyes- open, courts disaster, and throws hundred^ of well-paid men.out of work, at a juncture when other jobs cannot be found and thousands of unfortunates practically starving, one begins seriously to wonder whether it is quite sane. '..... The Sydney newspapers associated with what is known as the merger group put -if to' their army of employees recently that tho alternative to the closing down of one of the papers, and, as a natural corollary, the discharge of several hundred men, was a 15 per cent, all-round reduction in wages. By ballot, the big" majority of the union employees rejected the wage cut, in other words, they prefer.to join the army of unemployed. They prefer no bread at all to,half a loaf. And this x at a time when about;' one: person out of every eight employable people in Australia, is out'of work, with not the remotest chance of finding it. Beduced wages these.,days appears an infinitely better , proposition than the loss, of a job.* Not once,,in this fair continent's story, has. Labour put its head in the oven and turned the gas on. Perhaps it will wake up some day. The irony of this particular situation is that the union is levying those still in work 10 per cent, for tho upkeep of those who are ■ deliberately1" tossing themselves into the unemployed maelstrom. With the sacrifice of another five per cent., none ;<of them would have been out of jobs. The mental processes of: unionism these days are difficult, to fathom. .