NEMESIS FOR DARWIN LABORITES.

Taranaki Daily News, 25 March 1918, Page 6

NEMESIS FOR DARWIN LABORITES.

WORKS CLOSED DOWN. Sydney, March IS. Nemesis has at last overtaken the labor unions of Darwin. "And not before due time/' is the general comment in this country. The average Australian, accustomed as he is to the insatiable Bolshevik demands of some Labor unions, had to admit that conditions at Darwin were "over the fence."

Darwin is notorious as the place where hours are shorter, wages higher, anil unions more irreconcilable than anywhere else in the Commonwealth. The Northern Territory is a place where everything is run and done hv the State; and as the average union is deeply imbued with the idea that it is the State, the unions in Darwin practically took upon themselves the duty of running the whole Territory. Conditions were so intolerable that, the companies wherever possible would not allow their ships to call there. A. case is on record of the waterside workers refusing to unload a ship because the captain had had occasion to speak harshly of one of their members. The shipping company retaliated on the gommunity by sending the ship on her voyage, carrying some hundreds of tons of Darwin goods. Now, the chief industry of Darwin is the frozen meat industry, and great meat works, to treat the herds which have been built up in the interior in th« last few years, have been completed recently. Darwin has enjoyed a couple of years of prosperity while those works were bein? built, and it was looking forward to the imminent commencement of the killing period as the introduction to even happier times. The powerful A.W.U. (Australian Workers' Union), which has had affairs all its own way for so long, confidently opened negotiations with the v.osit company, and demanded a rate far in excess of that ruling anywhere else. Negotiations, by mutual consent, took place in Brisbane, and neither side seemed prepared to make concessions. Then, like a bomb, came the meat company's decision not to open the works this year—just the bald announcement, and nothing mori l . But it is obvious tlmt the powerftil interests represented by these meat works are not prepared to carry on under the intolerable condition* of the Darwin A.W.U., and are going to end it. It is going to mean disaster to Darwin, unless _the unionists capitulate very quickly, for there are many hu*>. dreils of men there who will be out of work.

No one loves the powerful meat companies of this country, and in any other circumstances public sympathy would be against them, but in this case, the arrogant and unreasonable unionists have arbused such, antagonism everywhere that their complete defeat will be welcomed as a good service to the Territory.

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