Points for the "Page."

Maoriland Worker, Volume 2, Issue 75, 16 August 1912, Page 3

Points for the "Page."

STRIKES AT HIGH PRICES!

Dealing with tho above, and in referring to tho wharf laborers of Sydney threatening to cease to handle frozen moat for export if the price is not redured to <a reasonable rato for local consumption, the Page says:—"There is a. movement in the same direction in New Zealand. There are something like a. Imndro-d thousand workers preparing for a. strike, and the number is growing nt the rate of a. thousand per week. And the strike will take placo at the ballot-box."

These are striking figures, and it strikes us someone has Wn taking it "neat." Where did tivv-p figures come from ?

The combined Trades Councils of thin Dominion represent about 15.000 workers. There must be a lot of "useful people" who work the workers to make up those figures.

Now as to striking at the ballot-box, let's apply that to Waihi. For 15 years the Trades Councils met annually, passed resolutions, went homo, and the workers went on working. For 15 years the workers went on receiving injuries, dying in batches, hospital always full — through bad conditions at Waihi.

Suddenly an organisation comes into being, without bothering particularly about that "box." They alter all those conditions. The death rate is reduced. The sick rate is reduced. The general earning conditions are so materially altered that the London owners of the mine declare that they will have to force the men back to the old conditions or "the miners will be getting all they produce" and there will bo no dividends left for them.

Says the Page, by striking at the ballot-box thero will be no interruption of work.

Under the new organisation there has been interruption- of work. The miners and the miners' wives have a holiday, their health has improved immovso.lv, not a man has been killed for

J?, wreks, not a man hstsjbeen-iojrpod for 12"weeks! That awful and continuous hacking cough, so characteristic of Waihi and other quartz-mining centres, has almost disappeared. And in spite of the fact that the new organisation is supposed to enjoy "sticking a knife under the ribs of their opponents," the Magistrate's Court is out of work.

But the dividend-drawers are howling.

The miners and their wives are not starving! Seven thousand six hundred and forty pounds were contributed in six weeks by the workers (not the "useful" brand) to help these miners regain their health. What has the Page to say about that?

This is a life-saving method. They haven't saved one man's life by sending him to Parliament; they have saved dozens of men's lives by direct action where the trouble was.

Says the Pace: "There will be no interruption l of the work." On the tombstones at Kaitangata—not on one, but on a dozen —one reads someone "killed in the mine" or "died through injuries received in tho mine"—and this joke is added: "Be ye also ready." If those men had not trusted to some Moses in a house called Parliament, but had refused to work under rotten conditions they might have been sitfcins on thra daisies now instead of lying underneath them. Selah—THE VAG.

A movement having for its object the formation of a Socialist federation amoiig the universities of the world was recently inaugurated at Manchester (Eng.), when the first inter-varsity Socialist conference was held. Among the premier schools to send delegates were Oxford, Cambridge, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Irish universities.