THE AUSTRALIAN TIMBER STRIKE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 653, 3 May 1929, Page 8

THE AUSTRALIAN TIMBER STRIKE

THE timber strike in Australia presents a disastrous example of the manner in which industrial disaffection may sway normally well-conducted citizens into fractious violence, if not open lawlessness. To associate the main body of idle millhands with the more vicious episodes wotild no doubt be unfair. No gathering, with sporting instincts, could approve the methods adopted by a callous minority in kicking free labourers almost to death. Thesq acts are not sanctioned by the principles of eyen the most rabid unionism. But the fact remains that the undisciplined character of the large union faction in the present dispute has contributed to its more violent features. While the great majority of the men may neither approve nor justify the acts of violence, they stand in a great immovable body between the actual offenders and the law. Their passive hulk protects that active section which exploits all the more dangerous possibilities of a big strike, and internal disagreements fostered by sectional leaders prevent the application of full pressure toward whatever legitimate aspirations lie at the base of the dispute. Like so many Australian strikes, the timber deadlock seems to have served no better purpose than to exalt the unbridled agitators for which that continent is becoming noted. A dispassionate examination of the facts and the influences surrounding them can lead to no other conclusion than that Garden and his associates are sinister and dangerous figures. While the timber strike spreads its spell of economic loss and social misery over a widening circle, into which women and children, and workers in associated trades, are drawn in turn, the engineers of the disturbance live in an atmosphere of exhilaration. Not for them is the squalor of a hack street of idle bread-winners, but the centre of the stage, with its interests and alarms, its interviews, its meetings, and that sense of power which undoubtedly raises the strike-parasite to a false level in the modern social scheme.

The confidence enjoyed by these men may be attributed, perhaps, to some magnetism of personality, more often to a brooding sense of injustice in the breasts of the workers. In the ease of the timber strike the leaders unquestionably command the only slightly qualified loyalty of the men, and even of the women, but unfortunately their difficulties are unlikely to be corrected by the methods followed. The grim paradox of the situation is that the strike springs in the first place from an Arbitration Court award. A Judge, with more courage than most, determined that the tottering timber industry might he «aved if workers started twenty minutes earlier each morning. His dictum plunged the industry into immediate idleness. Effigies of the learned Judge were burned in city streets, and he was parodied by a riotous mob. Against such humiliations the Judge is fortified hv a handsome salary. But that cannot he said of the carpenters and other workers—even as far away as New Zealand timber mills—embroiled unwittingly in the disturbance.