THE SYDNEY STRIKE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVI, Issue 213, 9 March 1914, Page 4

THE SYDNEY STRIKE.

Tiie butchers' strike which has just ended iu Sydney once again demonstrates the effectiveness and .the fatuity of the strike weapon. The men have lost hundreds and thousands of pounds in wages, the employers anil producer.! have also lost heavily, and the public have been very greatly inconvenienced. For what? Nothing at all. The men 1 certainly have had their wishes grati- , lied, in that they have made the mas- i ters who would not bend the knee to ' them "sit tip," but. in the process they ' have inflicted greater • harm on them- ; I selves and their cause and the unoffend- i Ing public than upon the employenj. 1 Like the leaders of the Waihi and Wei- ' lington watersiders' strikes, they never 0 looked before they leapt. Indeed, according 1 to cabled accounts, they never p

thought it would come to leaping. The employers had in the past more or less meekly conceded all their demands, and they never anticipated they would do oilier oil this occasion. Uul their 11H1IV did not come off. The employers had had enough, and i\ solved to light it out, even to the "last ditch." In this resolve they had the support of al! other employers of labor and of the public generally. This unexpected stand came as a surprise to the strikers in Sydney just as did the action of the farmers in regard to the New Zealand strike. ''Had the men known tiny would have had to fight other employers than the retail butchers, the strike would never have been precipitated," so runs a Sydney cable. Just so. So long as they meet with no resistance so long will workers of this class press their claims, however unreasonable they may be. Certainly, the amount involved was not much. It represented but half-a-crown extra a week. But it was not a question of amount; it was a question of principle. As one employer put it:—"The fact is that for the last two years the master butchers have been pin-pricked by the unions almost weekly. They cannot stand it any longer. The award has been kept by the men so long as it suited them, and" they do not appear to mind the letter of the law. Immediately a master butcher makes the slightest departure from the law he is lined. But the man can say, 'Wo don't recognise this as the law,' and no effort is made to punish them. The whole trouble is a scandalous piece of lawlessness, and so long as the machinery of the law remains as it is, so long will the troubles go on. . . . We cannot be at the mercy of the Trades all for ever. We decline to have the pistol at our heads all the time. We desire to keep within the law, and if men have a grievance they should/not shift it on to the public, but shmild make their appeal to the proper tribunal. The dilatory action of the Government has prevented this being done. The Department has a right to sec that the law is kept.. We want some guarantee that the stability of an industry will be maintained. This trouble is not a matter of wages. The principle of the. thing—this continual breaking of tiio law—has forced us into the fight." We have had the same sort of thing strikingly exemplified in New Zealand. Irresponsible sections of workerg don't care a snap of the fingers about arbitration awards or laws when they conflict with their conception of what is due to them. Awards are all right so long as I hey provide concessions in wages or conditions; when, however, the Government orders a bait in the interests of employer and industry, the men take the law into their hands, frequently with impunity, as we have seen lately. The other day it was shown that a Wellington firm had been fined heeauso it did not observe some trivial technicality in an award governing an industry, the workers in which had just before flouted the provisions of the award by going out on strike. The law can be disregarded by the workers, but let tho employer do the same, and he is promptly haled before the court and subjected to all the pains and penalties attached to it. It is an anomalous condition of things that would not be tolerated in a country that had a due appreciation of the claims of reason and equity, and a regard for the interests of both employer and employee.