The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1914. THE WATERSIDE WORKERS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXX, Issue 51, 16 October 1914, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1914. THE WATERSIDE WORKERS.

Within a year of the day when the, Wellington waterside strike began (October 22nd, 1913) members of the old union have, says the Wellington Post, regained complete control of the new union, which was built up on a foundation of arbitration. The struggle for the mastery has never slackened, but supremacy has not come to the ex-strikers as easily as their leaders predictod when the "stop-workers" ' returned to the wharves. There is one comfort for the public in the present turn of events. Observers who speak with knowledge of the waterfront say that the power will be held by moderates of the original union—men who have satisfied themselves, by a try-out, that reckless, unreasoning Red Federalism is a nuisance and an injury to Labor as well as to the whole community. It was a common belief—not disproved—a year ago that d.operates of the Waterside Union had allowed themselves to be dominated by a noisy, truculent minority, and that the manipulation of the union was a mockery of democracy, a travesty of majority rule. Ti'ao strike, the Post goes on to M>y, should be a life-long lesson for men who are' more interested in steady, honest work, at a fair wage with good conditions, than in tiresome irreconcilable militancy. They have learned the danger of apathy, or indifference, in regard to the management of their union affairs, and they have paid dearly for that foolish neglect by which the control passed to extremists, with a fatal ability to antagonise the public as well as the employers. Events have proved forcibly that moderate Labor has to bo on guard against certain types of leaders who seem to have a keener zest in industrial war, without lienor, than in peace, with honor.