THE STRIKE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1170, 11 November 1913, Page 2

THE STRIKE.

CHARGE OF ATTEMPTED

MURDER

Wellington, Nov. 9,

John Patrick Hassett was arrested on Saturday night on a charge of participating iu a riot in Taranaki street on Monday night last and attempting to murder Commissioner Cullen. He was alleged to be flourishing a revolver and firing shots during the disturbance. Hassett is further to be charged with assault, committed on Saturday night.

John Love was also arrested on a charge of using obscene language on Saturday while the special constables were going through Tory street, and Richard Jones was arrested at the same time on a charge of threatening behaviour.

WATERSIDERS’ TERMS

REJECTED,

Wellington, Nov. s

The Citizens’ Defence Committee to-day rejected the new conditions submitted with the consent of the watersiders through Mr Massey. These propose that an agreement be entered into to be eulorceable under the Trades’ Union Act iu the Magistrate’s Court; that the union be protected by legislation prohibiting the registration of a union when a similar union exists under the Trades Union Act,

The Committee pointed out that* the new union had now been formed aud duly registered, and no further negotiations will be entered into with any other organisation.

A STRIKER’S SUICIDE

Auckland, Nov. S.

Stanley Boomau, a striker, who left work as a carpenter at the Exhibition yesterday, cut his throat in his home in Nelson street to-day. He had been brooding on the strike all night, and this morning showed signs of dementia. He ordered his wife and children out of the house. Eater his wife came back and found her husband had cut his throat with a carving knife. He died at the hospital.

NOTES.

The strikers pelted the special police at Auckland on Sunday, but nothing serious happened.

Nearly five thousand men are idle in Auckland. Three thousand defenders of law and order are on duty in Auckland.

The general strike ordered in the three large centres by the Federation of Labour has found little response outside Auckland.

The Mai ton branch of the A..S.R.S. have passed a motion of sympathy with the Wellington Waterside strikers. The flaxmill workers have contributed over ,£SOO in aid of the waterside strikers’ wives and children. This amount was raised between Thursday and Saturday. —Standard. There is no cessation of work at the Wanganui wharf. The workers there refuse to recognise the Federation of Labour. The new waterside workers union at Wellington now numbers 270 and more men are enrolling. They are doing splendid work and making good money.

GENERAL STRIKED CONDEMNED.

“ Put a fool on a horse and he will ride to the devil!” That seems to be about the position of those who are controlling the destinies of the Federation of Labour at the present moment if they persist in their endeavouring to call a general strike.” In these words Mr M. J. Reardon, a member of the District Labour Council, and secretary of the General Labourers’ and other unions, summed up his impressions of the latest development in Federation policy. “Having got the waterside workers into the mire,” he continued, “ the Federation leaders seem now particularly anxious to drag others iulo the same difficulty. So far as the general labourers go, I want to make it perfectly clear to them that they should, at all hazards, completely ignore these adventurers. We have just signed up au agreement With the Wel«

lington City Council, and those employed by that body should be men enough to slick to their agreement. If those employed in connection with the sanitary works and at the destructor take the slightest notice of any outside interference such as this is, they will be not only enemies to the Labour movement, but to their wives and children and to the wives and children of the whole working-class population of the city.

“ Do these unscrupulous people realise,” continued Mr Reardon, " that if they interfere with the men who are engaged in seeing to the cleanliness of the city, they lay the children of the workers open to some frighttul pestilence, more virulent than that through which the northern part of this island has recently passed ? Do they realise that in such an event those who are going to suffer first are the working class population n the congested areas of the city ? If they do not realise their responsibilities, then I do mine, and I say unhesitatingly that any general labourer so employed, who takes the slightest notice of any call from outside persons to stop Work, deserves to be drummed out of the city.” ‘‘ln any case,” Mr Reardon went on to remark, “in their calm and dispassionate moments, the members of the General Labourers’ Union and of other unions in the Dominion, have voted against the policy of the Federation of Labour. Therefore, in an hour of panic and passion, it is the duty of every officer of such an organisation to see to it that members are not embroiled in a fight about which they were never consulted, and in which they were never consulted, and in which they have not the slightest hope of rendering any possible service.

“The Federation has never yet been able to show, in all its “ propaganda’ work, that the general strike has ever been successful in any country or under any circumstances. Writers ot standing in the Labour movement have shown over and over again that so soon as a general strike is called, then the public, in self-protection, has to set out to defeat the strikers.”