RED ENEMY OF LABOUR

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 747, 21 August 1929, Page 9

RED ENEMY OF LABOUR

TRADE UNION CONGRESS SEES DANGER COMMUNIST INFLUENCE rAustralian and N.Z. Press Association) LONDON, Tuesday. The annual report to be submitted to the Trades Union Congress at Belfast in September insists that political success must not be made the occasion of a slackening of efforts toward increasing the bargaining power of organised Labour or the extension of the influence of the trades unions. Two long sections of the report are devoted to the results of the inquiry into the disruptive elements within the unions. The report states that from the beginning of the Communist propaganda in Britain the constant endeavour of the Communists had been, not to voice honest criticism and use the unions as democratic machinery, but to divide and conquer the unions with the object of imposing a Communist autocracy. The Communist and Minority movements, acting under instructions from Moscow, made that their paramount aim. They followed a deliberate plan of splitting the trades union movement, in order to step in and use it for their own purposes. It was found that the driving force behind the anti-imperialism of the Minority League was the Third (Communist) International, from which its finances were largely derived. The Communist newspaper “Sunday Worker” in 1928 lost £IO,OOO, but managed to carry on after receiving donations from unnamed sources exceeding £15,000. Except in one or two cases the influence of the disruptive elements on the unions was decreasing. It had done the most harm where early action was not taken by the branches. The District Council, in the light of the evidence now available, feels that the unions are capable of co-operating in the task of stamping out the disruptive activity which undoubtedly has militated against the membership.