The Daily News. THURSDAY, 23, 1920. THE STEWARDS' STRIKE.

Taranaki Daily News, 23 December 1920, Page 4

The Daily News. THURSDAY, 23, 1920. THE STEWARDS' STRIKE.

It is estimated, states a recent Press cable from Sydney, that two thousand stewards are on strike, and that the numbers are daily increasing. At any time a strike is fraught with consequences which afflict the community, but the stewards' action in Austrafia has been timed to effect the utmost possible inconvenience owing to the exceptional traffic at this season of the year, and the number of immigrants arriving from overseas. The Dominions are dependent on the services of vessels quite as much as is Britain, so thai; dislocation of the means of transport is a serious matter. If the trouble were confined to the stewards little difficulty would'be experienced in overcoming it, but the Federation of Labor, whereby seamen and others back up the stewards, practically renders slapping owners powerless to. carry on their business. They are completely at the mercy of the Labor combine, and must either come to terms or cease operations. In this connection it is well to note that the leading officials of the New Zealand Waterside Workers' Federation recently asserted that one of its aims' was to confine industrial disputes to the department in which they originated, rather than to allow to be repeated the industrial dislocations such as had been experienced in the past. Yet, almost simultaneously with that hypocritical assertion, a pronouncement was made by a meeting of workers at Auckland in favor of one big union that would act in concert for securing all Labor demands—a Council of Action on the recent British pattern which contemplates and advises a general strike of all industries, or, hi other words, a dictatorship by the manual 1 ' workers over everybody else, the leaders being monarehs of all they survey. The people of the British Empire are neither ready nor willing for a dictatorship on the lines adopted by Lenin and Trotsky, nor are the mass of the , workers, though the latter appear to be willing to take all they can get as the result of such a dictatorship, and nothing but being faced with starvation when coercive tactics fail will open their eyes to the danger involved in the serfdom imposed by such a barbaric regime. It is the lust for power on the part of the extremists' leaders that it is at the root of the evil. Labor is on the verge of a dangerous_precipice, led thither by men who are utterly callous as to the consequences of their selfish aims, and actuated only by motives of self-aggrandisement. Such men are a curse to any country, and wreck, ers of the worst class. Their one obsession is to become industrial Napoleons, and it may be that the same fate awaits them that befell the ambitious little corporal. The Australian stewards state they are able to carry on the strike for a long period. If confined to their own. body it would not last twenty-four hours, for there is nothing in their work that could not be do-ip by any member of the community, as was proved in connection with the late war. It is satisfactory to note that immigrants en route to New Zealand are being provided for while stranded in Australia, but if the strike is to be continued some means will have to Ire devised for sending these people to their destination. The position is alike discreditable to the strikers and the age in which we live, besides being a direct blow to that freedom which is so highly prized by all democratic, countries. A strike is an ignoble form of coercion, therefore the greatest enemy to freedom that can be conceived.