The Daily News. TUESDAY, AUGUST 22, 1911. THE LATE STRIKE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 51, 22 August 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY, AUGUST 22, 1911. THE LATE STRIKE.

I The deplorable wages war (for tliat was what it really was) that was waged in England recently was probably the most dreadful visitation of the kind that has afflicted the Old Land since the Corn Laws riots. The wound lay very deep, and the reason for the tremendous upheaval which affected every class and kind at Home (and which will affect us, too) lay in the greed of great corporations aad the determination of commerce to squeeze the last ounce ,of work out of the toiler for -the least possible fraction of its value. Thus we find that tens of thousands of railway men and other transport workers were toiling for about double the hours the average New Zealander works for less than half the money. The Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants has a membership of 80,000, with a reserve fund of £430,000 —an extremely powerful organisation. Other railwaymen total 257,653, and it is thus seen at a glance what a desperate state of affairs must exist when these men are idle and the vast network of railways in England are robbed of their vital assistance. The great strikes at Home are emphatically the outcome of unionism—organised opposition to intolerable conditions. But a remarkable phase is that the unions have carried the non-unionists with them and that there is a vast united organisation ttot is, one would think, sufficiently powerful to settle once and for all the oppression that the British worker suffers under. At normal periods the membership of all the railway trades unions in England does exceed 50 per cent, of the outdoor employees. Past strikes have shown the tremendous influence of compact bodies of men acting simultaneously in all parts of the United Kingdom. The Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants has quite forty branches within twenty miles of London, and its organisation is also strongly exhibited around Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds and the whole of the Midlands. It is equally well established in the big South Wales coal mining and iron manufacturing area, the colliery and ship-building districts of the East Coast, and in the busy manufacturing districts in Scotland, from Dundee and Edinburgh in the east, to Greenock and Ardrossan on the west coast. So thoroughly is the membership distributed that the fiat of this single railway union, loyally carried out, could paralyse all the railways of the United Kingdom. The principal trade union organisations among railwaymen in England are the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, with 80,000 members; the Associated Society of Enginemen and Firemen, with 20,000 members; the Railway Clerks' Association, having almost 10,000 members; and the General Railway Workers' Union, with headquarters at Manchester and a membership of 7000. This gives a total of 117,000, not a poor proportion of the whole, but in times of stress union membership among railwaymen rises rapidly. When the A.S.R.S. pushed its national programme in 1007 it gained members at the rate of a thousand weekly. Apart from the actual question of wages, English railwaymen have during the last few njpnths shown ominous signs of genera] unrest. This has been indicated by occasional strikes, discouraged by the A.S.R.C., mainly for the sake of giving the conciliation system a fair trial. But the latest advices showed that the men's leaders now expressed profound dissatis-

faction with the results of the Conciliation Board scheme. They welcomed this method of coming to agreement with the great private companies owning the railways of the. United Kingdom, but they were not satisfied that the companies observed their side of the bargain. The stall' reductions consequent upon amalgamations and "working agreements," to avoid much of the old wasteful competition between the companies, also created a feeling of bitterness. One of the three English Parliamentarians known as "the railwaymen's M.lYs," Mr George Wardle, editor of the Railway Revie.w, the official journal of the English Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, recently toM a Birmingham audience of railwaymen that he was strongly of the opinion that the railway companies had not even yet realised what the agreement meant, and they certainly had done nearly everything to bar its progress. He had no hesitation in saying that the men were most dissatisfied with the working of the conciliation scheme, and they certainly had good grounds for dissatisfaction, first in the arbitrators' awards, and secondly in the time which was wasted in dealing with grievances. He criticised some of the arbitrator's decisions. In most of these there was*, he said, a decided bias against the men, and one could not help feeling that capital "held the sway." Another railwaymen's member, Mr. H. J. Thomas, warned the House of Commons, during a general discussion in criticism of the Board of Trade, that these, "working agreements" were becoming, a danger.. "Last yeax," he said, "the railway companies of this oountry carried millions of tone more merchandise and millions more passengers and added over £1,000,000 to their revenues as compared with the yeaT before. As a matter of fact, from the returns that we have obtained, it appears that in the railway service to-day there are nearly 10,00 fewer men employed than were employed ten years ago. That is exclusively brought about by the working agreements and amalgamations between railways which have taken place, and which, in our opinion, are contrary to public policy. Therefore, we say that if we are to be face to face with one huge monopoly run in the interests of dividend earning exclusively, then we stand for the complete State ownership of railways." On the subject of conciliation, he was brief, but emphatic: "There was a question whether the Board of Trade would help the seamen and firemen in the establishment of conciliation boards. I can only say that, much as I welcome conciliation and kecn- ! ly as I have supported |he principle of conciliation and arbitration, I have no , hesitation in asserting the general ex- | perience of railwaymen in this country . has been such that to-day they would 'abolish the present system." The railway companies liaye resisted any attempt to shorten the standard day, now twelve hours. Their e.mployeeSj consider that in view of the increased intensity of the work due to heavier trains and higher speeds, an eighl-Jiour, day should be instituted'. Increased wages are also demanded. Over 110,600 out of 220,000 -railwaymen eligible to join the Amalgamated' Society of Railway Servants 'do not receive £1 per week, and the .great bulk of the remainder earn less ithan 30s weekly. Men who toil so arduously and for so little money have ! no time for self-improvement and know .only one method of retaliation, and, led' by the cleverest of their fellows, they Shave taken it. It is impossible not to 'express sorrow for the millions of British ,workers—the best the world has—in ;their wretchod conditions, or to hope that out of the sorrow and starvation ! 'and bloodshed a now era may come, Svlien there shall be less grinding of huJman bones to maJte. bresid for the wealthy. ' ' . 1 '