A LABOUR VIEW OF THE WAIHI STRIKE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1007, 8 October 1912, Page 4

A LABOUR VIEW OF THE WAIHI STRIKE.

Writing in a Wellington contemporary, Mr W. T. Mills, the founder of the United Labour Party, says :—The fact is that the struggle at Walhi Is a struggle between members of the working class. The fact is that with the adjustment of the disputes between the members ot the working class in Waihi there is no other dispute to be adjusted. The question is not whether members of the working class shall do anything against the working class. The only question in New Zealand is whether the members of the working class can so consolidate their organisations that they may make an end of war within the working class and use their combined strength in disputes with those who are the exploiters of the working class. This assumption that any member of the working class can be made the spokesman for the working class without the consent of the working class is utterly absurd. The greatest problem in New Zealand is the creation of such a body of workers, from the organised bodies within all the industries, that there shall be a means of directly stating what the conditions and contentions of the working class really are, in order that men may reasonably contend for loyalty to the positions of the working class. That can only be done through the democratic organisation ot all the industries and the consolidation in a single national body of the separate industrial democracies, It is Mr Parry and his associates who have done most to make this impossible, who refuse consolidation with other workers, refuse co-operation at the ballotbox, give more time to attacking labour organisations which cannot uphold their impossible tactics than to any constructive programme whatsoever for the deliverance of labour from exploitation. It was Mr Parry’s organisation which bolted from the National Federation of Trades Councils and organised a faction by itself. The Thames Miners’ Union was formerly composed of seven branches. One of these branches was at Waihi. The Waihi branch, and the Waihi branch only, bolted from the Union representing their own industry in their own district and formed a factional fighting body on the outside. And it is this taction of the working class which assumes to be the working class, and to denounce not the enginedrivers in Waihi only, but 90 per cent, of the organised labour of New Zealand as “scabs,” “fakers,” “imposters,” and “renegades,” because the 90 percent, withholds approval of the impossible tactics of the 10 per cent., and then the 10 per cent., from the lips of Mr Parry, proclaims that it is a fixed principle that every worker that belongs to the wage working class should never do anything against the class.