The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY IS, 1927.

Hokitika Guardian, 18 February 1927, Page 2

The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY IS, 1927.

THE PENALTY OF THE STRIKE. Thf. cable news brought the pleasing information this week that the threatened strike of the coal miners was not likely to eventuate. Such a calamity would mean the immediate loss of employment to over 30,000 miners, and tliose directly dependent on them. But the good sense of the men appears to have prevailed over their leaders. The indirect losses by such a strike—the cessation of transport, the dislocation of indutry, the decline of purchasing power among the wage-earning classes as a whole—no imagination can possibly jiicture at the present time. But the whole of Australia must suffer—and, incidentally, New Zealand must suffer as well—through an industrial dispute that need never under any conceivable circumstances be allowed to run to such disastrous extremes. At the close of the British coal dispute —“the mast costly strike in the industrial history of the world”—an authoritative American financial journal, the New York Trust Company’s “Index,” took the opportunity to discuss

at some length “'the high cost of the strikes,” and some of the facts and liggures that it cited are certainly very impressive. Even before the war, in 1913, strikes and lockouts were responsible for a. loss of about 11,500,000 working days in one year in "Britain. Alter the war, when the workers found that industrial conditions were not to he materially improved, trouble liegan again, and in 1919, 31,500,000 working days were lost through strikes and lockouts. Between 1921 and 1926, the number of days lost every year by British wage-earners averaged 11,000,000. But the climax of all these follies and disasters was reached with the coal strike towards the close of last year. Though statistics are generally regarded as dry and uninteresting, this is one of the occasions when they seem to speak more distinctly and more loudly than mere words. In the 15-year period 1910-25 the loss in working days in Britain, through strikes and lockouts, totalled nearly 300,000,(XX). But during the lialf-yenr— to be precise, £9 weeks—for which the coal strike lasted, while over a million men were thrown out of work, about 140.000.000 days—nearly half the entire total for the previous fifteen years—were wasted in idleness. In wages alone the loss to the workers engaged in this dispute is put down at- £55,000,000, and the direct cost to the owners was at least £300,000.000. But when we come to consider the indirect effects of the strike—including the increase of in employment in other trades by over 50 per cent., and the loss of markets abroad and at liome which British producers will not regain easily or soon—it may well seem impossible to exaggerate the amount of material injury thus inflicted on Britain. And all this loss and waste has been suffered without permanently benefiting the wage-earners. Neither the Germans nor the Americans can show such a record as this, and it is ail undoubted fact that the rapid expansion of American. and German industry since the war, as compared with Britain’s decline, is largely due to their relative freedom from such industrial crises. The workers of Australia evidently took thought of tlie hitter experiences through which the British wage-earn-ers have so lately passed before plunging into this ruinous and profitless ad- j venture themselves.