THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, MARCH 22, 1907. THE COST OF STRIKES.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8386, 22 March 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, MARCH 22, 1907. THE COST OF STRIKES.

4~— i Are strikes going out of fashion? This is hardly the time to ask the question so far as New Zealand is concerned, but then we are only a very small corner of the world. Commenting on the end of the musichall strike in London, the first in which worker with wages varying from 30s to £2OO a week joined hands the London Daily Express thinks that strikes are coming to be regarded as an antiquated method of industrial warfare. Nearly all strikes • eventually end in compromise, and compromise at the beginning would save much money and suffering. The Daily Express states that nearly £2,500,000 has been spent by the principal trade unions in the United Kingdom on strike pay during - the last ten years. The number of strikes average about 1,000 annually, involving a loss of over 10,000,000 days of individual labour. In some years' the loss was much greater. In 1898 the loss was 15,000,000, and in 1893, a great strike year, it was 31,000,000. According to an official report, in 1905, largely as a result of strikes or notices to strike, aboutt 319,000 workers obtained increases of £16,300 per week, arid about 250,000 sustained decreases of £18,500 per week. The fortunes of war, therefore, are not wholly with the workers from a financial point of view, while from the standpoint of personal comfort they are invariably the greater sufferers. Several cases are quoted to show that the end is generally > compromise or the defeat of the strikers. In 1890 miners struck for a 10 per cent, advance, and accepted 5 per cent, in five days; in 1892 the Durham miners struck against a 13| per cent, reduction, and eventually accepted a 10 per cent, reduction; in 1898, 50,000 Welsh miners struck, and after weeks of dire distfess accepted the masters' terms; in the great dock strike in 1889, 80,000 men

went out, and gained many concessions, the strike being ended by the arbitration, of several public men. The great engineers' srike for an eight-hour day began in July, 1897, and lasted till January, 1898, when the men's demands were withdrawn. In the last case the damage done to English trade was immense, for foreign orders went elsewhere. In short, the loss is said to be far greater than I the gain.