The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET. AUCKLAND FRIDAY. OCTOBER 19, 1928 STRIKERS RUSH FOR WORK

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 489, 19 October 1928, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET. AUCKLAND FRIDAY. OCTOBER 19, 1928 STRIKERS RUSH FOR WORK

A CURIOUS spectacle is reported to-day from Melbourne. The scene represents a typical phase of Australia’s chronic industrial malady. There, on one part of the waterfront, a red flag, bearing the defiant device, “No Surrender!” symbolises the spirit of the waterside-workers who are on strike, while at another point along the quays hundreds of strikers struggle keenly in queues to obtain a licence or the right to work in conditions of legality. Surely a striking example of the spirit being willing and the flesh weak. In terms of cold truth the stupid men have been taught another lesson on the futility of allowing themselves to become agitated in disrupted idleness. Unfortunately, it is not likely that they will heed the lesson. Over a long period of years they have demonstrated at great cost to themselves and at a greater cost to their easy-going country that, in Australia experience does not teach fools. The habit of striking for any reason or no valid reason a± all has become a vice. The latest available official record of industrial strife in the Commonwealth shows that disputes, involving stoppage of work and disruption of trade, average rather more than one each working day. No doubt, if Sunday were not a compulsory day of rest the agitators in the sensitive circle of industrial unionism would contrive somehow to increase the average daily record of strikes. From 1922 to 1926, inclusive, all groups of organised workers in Australia precipitated over two thousand industrial disputes. Nearly 640,000 workers were involved in the epidemic of industrial disorder. The working days that were lost totalled 5,362,139, and the aggregate loss in wages was set down at £5,468,069. No statistician could compute with anything like acceptable accuracy the amount of money lost as a result of trade disorganisation. This tally of disputes may not be a world’s record, but it certainly is bad enough to be a disgrace to a young nation with ample scope and appealing necessity for development and steady progress. The hot-bed of provocative strife in industry is in New South Wales, particularly on the coalfields, where, in 1926, there were no fewer than 202 disputes between the miners and mine-owners. But no State in the Commonwealth escaped the havoc of strikes in that year, or, indeed, at any other period. There were 256 disputes in New South Wales, 33 in Victoria, 29 in Queensland, 17 in South Australia, 9 in Western Australia, 10 in Tasmania, 2 in the Northern Territory, where there is hardly sufficient population to maintain a strike, and 4 in the Federal capital territory, where sewerage workers fell out with the politicians over the retieulation works for Canberra. Little attention need be given to the daily occurrence of minor disputes. These are ranked by Australians with the swarms of other pests. The country’s chief trouble lies in the plague of big strikes which, on every Occasion for years past, have achieved nothing but extravagant loss and misery. Agitators alone have done well out of industrial war. Their pay goes on all the time. Many remedies have been tried, but those of Labour Governments have been as effective as pills for the cure of earthquakes. A remedy appears to have been discovered at last. This is firm and fearless government. Now that Mr. Stanley Bruce has found the way to compelling strikers to rush into a queue of applicants for work, he should keep to it and make an end to disorderly agitation and mischievous strikes. SOME LESSONS IN FORESTRY ' IT is one thing for New Zealand to be told about the prodigal waste that has marked her timber-getting methods in the past. .We are already aware of it. The painful story of slaughtered forests is inseparable from our national history. But it is another thing to be told in plain terms that the wastage is still going on. We should have learned our lesson, but we have not done so. The delegates to the Imperial Forestry Conference, who are engaged in a tour of the Dominion, have made some interesting comments on New Zealand forests, both exotic and indigenous. No layman can fail to be impressed with the sheer beauty and majesty of the native forest. To captivate the eye and sway the senses there are sometimes long, cathedral-like vistas between columns of towering trees; sometimes dense, matted screens of impenetrable foliage; and, again, the delicate, dappled tracery of sky and greenery overhead. These are features that influence the judgment of the layman. To such considerations the forestry expert allies the potentialities of the particular forest in terms of saleable timber, its accessibility, its area, and the prospects of its replacement. His examination is, therefore, a searching test, and it is satisfactory to learn that the pitiful remnants of the original forest are still capable, under this keen scrutiny, of winning the trained investigator’s admiration. There is nothing in the comment of the visitors to shake confidence in the future of the State’s afforestation projects, but there is a lesson of timely value in Lord Clinton’s belief that the State should control the wastage still evident in private milling operations. There is another lesson in Mr. R. D. Richmond’s observation that, in the State plantations, immediate thinning operations are imperative. “The State cannot afford not to do it,” says Mr. Richmond, and his judgment cannot be ignored Here is a chance to sweep the streets clear of unemployed men By accepting Mr. Richmond’s advice, the Forestry Department and the Government can obey the dictates of two responsibilities • the obligation to maintain the forests in a healthy condition, and the obligation to find practical jobs, even though they be’only temporary, for some of the men who are out of work.