COOKS AND COMMERCE

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 337, 24 April 1928, Page 10

COOKS AND COMMERCE

NOW that the marine cooks have succeeded by their practice of job-control in paralysing the activities of a whole fleet of ships, they may imagine they have reason to be proud of their achievement. As the result of a vieious policy of hold-up, a great company is forced into idleness, trade is dislocated, and thousands of men become involved to their loss and detriment in a dispute which can have only one end. But, however clever the cooks may consider their action, it Is not for a moment to be imagined that they will achieve any pei’manent benefit by this method of backing an unjust demand. To yield to such tactics would he to hand shipping over to the control of a clique whose ruinous demands would increase with every opportunity to defy discipline and authority. The trouble started on the Ulimaroa, a well-known New Zealand trader under the Uuddart-Parker flag, the galley staff refusing to resume duty because the company refused, an unreasonable demand to employ two extra hands. The Ulimaxoa had to be laid up, and since then the cooks have found pretext to tie up ship after ship, until, with the blacklisting of the Goulburn in Sydney yesterday, the entire Huddart-Pai'ker fleet is now idle. . It cannot be thought that the cooks are alone in this exercise of job-control. Alone, they would get short shrift. _lt is plain that the other marine unions are behind them, following a policy of passive support; for if the sailors and firemen objected to being rendered idle in this manner, the cooks would not survive their pressure for one day. The indications are that the other unions may give more than practical sympathy to the cooks, and that the trouble may extend to all the ships on the Australian coast, necessarily involving New Zealand. The public will endure the struggle with patience, if it does come; for it is time, after years of irritation tactics, that the question was decided whether the owners or the men are to control the ships of commerce.