FUTILITY OF DIRECT ACTION.

Taranaki Daily News, 19 March 1921, Page 12

FUTILITY OF DIRECT ACTION.

THE LESSON OF THE WATERSIDE DISPUTE.

(Contributed by the N.Z. Welfare League.) In our last article on the waterside hold-up, we urged that the protracted debate be brought to a close and the work resumed. We are pleased to find that this has come about and the activities of our ports are once more an evidence of the futility of direct action methods. It is not to state the terms of settlement even if we knew everything. The work being resumed and the public interest, thereby, conserved is sufficient satisfaction to us for the reason that we have acted only in the public interest and no other. Of this we are confident, that when the whole matter is summed up it will be found that everybody has lost. That is the essential stupidity of these industrial battles, the workers lose, the employers lose and the patient, longsuffering public lose most of all. It has become the fashion in certain labor circles to talk as if the system of settling* disputes, by arbitration was played out, yet we find that when they resort to direct action, the final result is achieved by some form of conciliation or arbitration. In the ease’ of the waterside dispute after the parties had butted their heads together for weeks, Mr. Massey was brought in as conciliator, the outsider again, and it is settled in a few days. Had the matter of difference been referred to the Arbitration Court in the first instance it would have meant a saving of much time, a saving of a large amount to the workers in wages, and a cohsiderable saving to the shipping companies and the general public. We go further and affirip that it will be found that the Arbitration Court would have made just as good a settlement as has now been made. War was preferred to arbitration and yon cannot go to war without enormous expense and prodigal waste. Had the men who decided on war been possessed of sufficient reason they would have seen that the issue was settled before the battle commenced. The Seamen's Union reasoned the matter out. and seeing that was the case they wisely declined to enter intjj. a useless and. wasteful battle. The direct actionists unfortunately seldom count the cost or weigh matters up until they are in the-midst of the trouble, and then have to bend all their energies On finding a means of retreat.

If the workers would, learn the lesson of this recent struggle they would come to realise that after all wages are not fixed by anything but the pressure of general economic The Arbitration Court, the round table conference, stop-work methods' are each and all nothing more than methods of interpreting the economic law; it is the law that governs. Of all those methods the “stop-work” system is the most futile and the most wasteful. Take the bonus of 3s per week: If a man loses three weeks’ wages of £5 per week, it will take him two years to make up that loss out of the bonus of 3s per week, and then he has no bonus. There is another direction in which the waterside worker loses in that, if 'he has a lot of work in a rush, it but attracts a greater number of men and makes the dead period ail the more severe for the regular* water, siders. The course of waterside employment is its intermittent character and those are the best friends of the men who seek to make the trade of our ports as regular and constant as possible. A ship’s cargo is only handled once, and if she comes once to the port when she might have come twice, the wharf men know there is so much less work for them, no matter when they discharge her. The futility of direct action is in its absolute wastefulness, in its upsetting of the regularity of trade on which the workers depend more than all others. In view of the general loss and the imperative need of the Dominion to get its produce away, specially at this time of financial stringency, it becomes a question whether Parliament should not legislate to prohibit the direct action method being applied, at least in respect to the key industries of our country.