Trades and the Workers

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 624, 28 March 1929, Page 9

Trades and the Workers

By

"ARBITER"

UNION MEETING DATES Thursday, March 2S (To-night) Engine Drivers Thursday, March 28 (To-night) *.. Boilermakers Thursday. March 2S (To-night) Plumbers' Educational Tuesday. April 2 Engineers Wednesday, April 3 .. Carpenters

Mr. R. F. Barter, secretarv of the Amalgamated Engineers. has been through the Thames Valley and the Waikato on organisation work. Things in the South Auckland districts he says, are not good, and industrial conditions in the engineering trades are anything but encouraging. * * * Arbitration Court The Arbitration Court, which has been sitting in Auckland for a couple of weeks, went to Cambridge on Tuesday to hear a transport question. Short sittings will be held in Wanganui and New Plymouth before the members return to Auckland to resume its sitting on Monday week, April 8. The Auckland sitting will last until the beginning of May. Easter Conference Auckland will be well represented at the Labour’s Easter Conference, which is to open at Wellington on Easter Monday. This is the conference at which Labour’s policy is formulated, and which virtually guides the destinies of the Labour movement throughout the Dominion. Questions covering the whole field of industry as it affects the worker will be discussed, and other policy moves for the advancement of the Parliamentary Labour Party will be brought forward for discussion and decision. Auckland’s representatives probably will leave here to-morrow evening. • * * Labour In The City Labour will be represented in the Mayoralty contest by Mr. T. Bloodworth, who contested the position at the last Municipal elections two years 3-go. Mr. H. G. R. Mason, M.P. for Auckland Suburbs, had announced his candidature, but in the face of Mr. Bloodworth’s willingness to stand. Mr. Mason withdrew. As the position is an important strategic one for Labour, it is well that the candidate who is representing the party in this fight should be unfettered by Parliamentary ties which would seriously divide his attentions between general politics and the municipality. Labour is organising thoroughly to see that everyone is on the roll, and although' this job has provided untold effort, it is being disposed of successfully. In fact, it will probably be found that the municipal roll on this occasion is the best organised for many years. The 1928 Committee Labour apparently does not take the 1928 committee seriously. Mr. E. J. Howard, M.P. for Christchurch South, and a stalwart of the party, says that the committee is out of date and not likely to do anything really effective The attitude of the Labour Party towards the present Government, he said, was to take every bit of legislation that Sir Joseph Ward brought down

and analyse it thoroughly. On the result of that analysis the attitude of Labour depended. So long as the Prime Minister did not attempt to take away any of the things which had ween won for democracy, it woud be all right. ‘But we will no more stand by Sir Joseph Ward than by anyone else if he tries any monkey tricks.’ ” Labour At Geneva One of the first things the Prime Minister, Sir Joseph Ward, is expected to consider on return from his tour of the South will be the question of New Zealand's representation at the International Labour Conference under the auspices of the League of Nations, which is to meet at Geneva in May. In a message to the Labour Party Leader recently, Sir Joseph Ward said he personally favoured sending a delegate- He could not gi\.e full consideration to the matter until his return from Invercargill, he said, but he would try to arrange a representation to go forward this year. The constitution of such representation would be decided later. If the Government sends a delegate from New Zealand it will rectify a long-standing oversight of the Reform Shirking Their Job A feature of city loan works which should be watched by the authorities —and which is watched by the workers with some annoyance—is the influx of workers from other cities and country districts immediately a loan proposal is announced. As soon as it was reported that the Auckland tramway extension works were to be gone on with, men began to come from all parts of the island, and some even came from the South —long before the loan even was placed before the ratepayers. This merely aggravates the heavy burden of other people’s troubles which this city is carrying already. It is time that smaller local bodies should accept their responsibilities m helping their own unemployed. Auckland is the victim of the grayest injustice in the Dominion in this respect. because the jobs which have been put in hand by the city authorities have attracted those who are unable to get placed in their own localities. Some of those who are watching the interests of the unemployed here are trying to devise a scheme whereby only those who have been in this district for a certain period are allowed to work on jobs which are undertaken here. This would be a difficult proposition, but if it could be worked successfully the general outlook for the unemployed would be brighter because those local bodies which are now shirking their job would be made to look after their own men.

Capital In Its Place The absolute destruction of private capitalism was recently urged* by the Mayor of Christchurch, the Rev. J. K. Archer, as the only true remedy for the economic troubles that exist in the world to-dav. “We can’t get rid of capital—capital is one of the essential things of life; it is not money as is commonly supposed. but the machinery of life,” the Mayor added. “We don’t want to get rid of capitalists. What we want to do is to multiply the capitalists fifty - fold so that every man who works is a capitalist. “We want life to be organised on the co-operative principle.” The Mayor said he did not agree that the remedy for the present state of affairs was shorter hours. That may be a sort of palliative, but it was not the real remedy. He believed in shorter hours, but as long as they were used for the benefit of the capitalistic side of life they were not going to be a remedy. “Until we get some form of co-opera-tive ownership and control, and until we get such a position where a working man is not working machinery for private capitalism, but is a Partowner of the machinery, and participates in the results from his labours, we will not get salvation.’’ Why Timber Suffers While the exports of timber from New Zealand has declined from 47,500,000 sup. feet in 1923 to just short of 35,000,000 last year, the imports of foreign woods to this country have risen from 36,000,000 sup. feet in 1923 to 50,500.000 last year. The value of last year’s importations was £671,962. The value of last year’ exportations was £367,024. The total output of sawn timber in the New Zealand mills over the same period has dropped from 317,000.000 sup. feet in 1923-24 to 269,800.000 sup. feet in 1927-28. Auckland Province remains the greatest producer. then Westland. Wellington. Southland, Hawke’s Bay, Otago, Marlborough. Canterbury and Taranaki follow in that order in volume of production. The quotation of these figures is a

convincing explanation of why the tire her trade has suffered the most hard ship in recent years, and why it has dropped from the second largest ser ondarv industry to about sixth on the list.