COTTON TRADE DISPUTE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 2999, 23 September 1908, Page 5

COTTON TRADE DISPUTE.

STRANGE RELATIONS. PROSPECTS OF A PROTRACTED STRIKE. Received September 22, 10.20 p.m. LONDON, September 22. While the Trade Unionists in Lancashire would welcome the intervention of the Board of Trade in connection with the strike most of the big spinning concerns are glad of the opportunity of the closing of the mills for a time in order to reduce stocks. The relations of the spinners and Cardroom Amalgamation Society ,ure strained owing to the readiness of the spinners to yield if the General Federation of Trade Unions, which is already furnishing five-eighths of the card and blowing rooms strike pa\, agive to help the spinners. The pro-pects of a protracted strike are alarming.

An English paper recently re-marked-.-"After several years of abounding and almost unexampled prorperity, Lancashire is once again harassed by the ai:xietie3 arising out of its peculiarly fluctuating com-, meres. The boom is over the demand has been outstripped by the supply, and it is now proposed to reduce the output by diminishing the working tiaie of the mills. This is a drastic remedy for a disease which has to some extent been created py the eagerness of capitalists and speculators to make money, and its effects are felt with special severity by the operatives, who must sacrifice part of their earnings so that capital may cut its losses. An enormous amount of wealth'has been accumulated by the Lancashire cotton industry in the last three years. Dividends have leaped up to giddy heights, fortunes have be?n made on every hani; the county is rich oeyond computation. And yet we are about to see in sharp ironic contrast, the poor compelled to suffer tie hardships of unemployment and privation in order to restore the balance of an industry so prosperous that more than twenty millions of fresh capital has been invested in its development since 1905." The proposal of the masters is that the men accept a 5 per cent, reduction in wages from January next.