LABOUR NOTES.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 5 June 1901, Page 4

LABOUR NOTES.

A conference of shipowners and seamen is to bo held in Sydney this month, to consider the rate of wages, overtime, and hours.

The Government Tramway Employees' Union of Sydney has a membership of 1400. It has beon decided to form a social club, and to take rooms at each depot as a rendezvous on the lines of that now in existance in North Sydney, where papers, magazines, and other periodicals may bo found, together with draughts, chess, cards etc.

Writing of the Socialist movement at Homo to a friend in Wellington, Keir Hardie, M.P., and editor-proprietor of the Labour Leader, says :—" The movement i 3 looking up. The work of the I.L.P. (Independent Labour Party) office has greatly increased. The inertia of the past few years is disappearing, and altogether is tinged with hope."

Mr J. L. Fegan, whose appointment to a high office under the Federal Government caused such a stir recently in Australia, began life as a coalminer, and he went into the New South Wales Parliament as a Labour member, then became an independant Labour member. He rose to the position of Minister of Mines.

The London Daily Mail of 9th April says that it is now probable that Lord Pcnrhyn's slate quarries will be closed for an indefinite period. The men on strike met at Bethseda yesterday, and, while expressing a desire for arbitration, resolved to remain out on strike until fair terms of settlement are arrived at. The proposer of the resolution said it would be better for the workmen to die in the wilderness than return on the old terms. They demanded fair wages and respect from those who had treated them as slaves.

Prescot at tho present day is as noted for its watches as in the busiest times of its representative industry. The Lancashire Watch Company, turning out some 400 English levers a day, all in machinemade interchangeable parts, have practically destroyed the American export trade to England in cheap watches and restored its prosperity to a whole district formerly an industrial decay.