STRIKE IN BRITAIN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 61, 30 July 1912, Page 5

STRIKE IN BRITAIN.

THE MANIFESTO REJECTED. ®v Cable—Press Association—Copyright. London, July 28. A mass meeting of thousands of dockers unanimously rejected the Strike Committee's manifesto, and resolved not to resume work without guarantees that the masters would maintain the recent agreements. It was announced that the funda would suffice to feed dependents for three weeks.

THE STRIKE MANIFESTO.

Received 29, 9.5 p.m. London, July 29. Mr. Havelock Wilson, during his visit to Hull, stated that he was convinced that the strike was foredoomed to fail*re. He wrote to the Strike Committee denouncing Ben Tillett's prayer, and declining to continue the campaign. He ■ays that some of the employers are members of the Government, and he is satisfied himself that the employers' assurances are just and generous, and their consideration of grievances in consultation with the unions could be accepted. He, with Mr. Hopkins's support, induced the Sailors -and Firemen's Union to inform the committee that the strike must end. Various unions consulted to-day regarding the situation. Two thousand strike-breakers at Birkenhead have been accommodated on shipboard. THE STRIKE COMMITTEE. IRATE STRIKERS. Received 29, 11.15 p.m. London, July 29. Mr. Henderson concluded his speech by warning workers of • the danger of a "down tools" policy proving ineffective. Wherever workers properly used their opportunity a meeting with the employers had done more than was ever gained bv a strike.

Mr. Gosling told a mass meeting that the Strike Committee had been accused of agitating to keep the strike alive, but it was now made clear that the accusation was untrue. Many strikers were angry throughout the meeting, and threatened to overturn the platform. .Subsequently the committee's notices ordering a resumption of work were torn down. A ONE-MAN STRIKE. ORIGIN - OF THE TROUBLE. The strike, which began on May 23, and has since bpen paralysing the shipping trade of London, originated over the refusal of a member of a foreman's union to leave that organisation and join the Amalgamated Society of Watermen. Lightermen and Watchmen. A man named Thomas, who had been a foreman, was employed by the Mercantile Lighterage Company as a watchman. The lightermen declared he was a nonunionist, because they did not recognise the foremen's union as a labor organisation. They declined to work with a nonunionist, and withdrew their labor from the Mercantile Lighterage Company without anv notice. This precipitated a general strike in the Port of London.

It is a singular fact, the Daily Telegraph recently remarked, that several big labor disputes in the last two or three years have had similar beginnings. The one-day strike on the North-Eastern Railway was over a question whether a man should work at one end of a goodsshed in Newcastle or the other. The year before last most of the cotton mills in Lancashire were rendered idle for a week because one man declined to do certain work in cleaning his "cards," and at the end of last year there was begun another and much more serious deadlock in the cotton trade because two or three non-unionists were employed at certain mills.

Sir Edward Clarke, in his official enquiry, found that the men, thinking that a supposed agreement to employ only Unionists had been violated, stopped ■work; whilst in other cases employers (generally of the smaller sort) had never given the wages agreed upon after the last strike, and were not now giving them; and, when other employers tried to force them, simply left the association which made the agreement.