UNITED LABOR PARTY

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 10713, 16 December 1912, Page 6

UNITED LABOR PARTY

CONDUCTED BY THE DOMINION EXECUTIVE COUNCIL. (Tlio Ea.ster Conference of the United Labour Party voted to make no paper its special organ, but to provide official news and comments to any paper promising to regularly publish the same. Tlio paper is not responsible for this column and the party assumes no responsibility for any utterances of the paper except for its own official utterances in this department. BUT YOU CAN'T AFFORD IT. At every point when the proposal is I made to make a private monopoly a ! public enterprise the complaint is [made that the public cannot afford , the money. Tt will cost so much trt [establish a public enterprise that it. 'cannot be undertaken, i The answer is that it costs more not to do it than it can possibly cost to do it. In many cities in Great ative and municipal bakeries hare beon'established. In every instance there has resulted better bread, iowr prices, more sanitary conditions, better conditions for the labor employed, and in no case has there been a loss to the community on its investment. Doing it haa always proven to be cheaper than not doing it. Take Wellington. It is estimated that an up-to-date bakeiy, sufficient to supply the whole community with say 15,000 loaves daily, would cost £40,000 to completely equip for the making and the distribution of the brand." If the £40.000 were to be carried as a permanent loan at ;"

per cent, the annual ccst would be £2OOO. But the bread could he, produced and delivered in oiled, paper, with nevpv human hands touching it or the foulness, of the streets reaching it from the time it left the ovens till it reached the diningrooms of the people, and the .bread could be produced and delivered and interest paid at. 2d per loaf.

The current price is 3sd That would be a net saving of 1-J-d per loaf. There would be a business of 1">,000 loaves daily. This would .moan a netsaving to the people in their bread account. . •

Yes, but thi.« would mean a loan of £40,000. This dty cannot afford to make the loan. It is better to borrow £-10,000 once than to lose £33,(545 annually, and then have all the filth of the street and all the danger of infection carried with the bread to even' home.

But if the city cannot use its credit to borrow £40,000 it can do what might be a better thing—it can sell bread certificates at a reduced price, collect the payments in advance, and finance the bakery without the borrowing of a single shilling, could pay 'for the bakery with the bread produced in the bakery by spreading the cost of the plant to the price of the bread, say, extending over a period of five years.

All that would be necessary to do this would be simply for the City Council to become a business body devoted to actually doing the business of the people instead of doing nothing, while wasteful methods of production and dangerous methods of distribution in enterprises out of date render the poorer service for the higher price. FRATERNAL DELEGATES.

Hereafter tho .British Trades Un- j ion Congress will sent a •fraternal delegate to the annual Labor Conferonce in Canada. The man ehosen to he the first delegate is Will Thorn. Hasten the day when such delegates will he sent to all English-speak-ing nations. The interchange of delegates has been made between the United §tates and Great Britain for. eighteen years, and the Hiinttal visit to tliQ, Unit&d '.States flf tllOStt wl» represent the British trade unionists has come to be an event looked forward to year by year, and is always of very great importance to -American movements. Lecture tours are best which "England has to say is said tp the cousins in Yankee-land. Recent visits to the United States from Germany have been keenly appreciated !ti the same way. For the first tiino in American history a representative of the trades uniom-ts j of a foreign country was Shown "he ' courtesy of being invited to sprue to the House of Representative* of .the American. Congress. Tt was on. the occasion of the visit of - the vice-president of tho central organisation of the German trades unions Jess than a year ago that this occurred. . _, The British and Continental trades unionists arof constantly "changing works," and wifJh every such visit the solidarity of the workers of the world is greatly promoted, the strength of the movement greatly increased, the danger of international war greatly lessened, and the coming of industrial justice hastened not for one trade or for one nation but for all workers in all lands.

Tho. United Labor I\irty depends entirely upon an. appeal to the intelligence, to the public spirit, and to

the public interest in the proposals it offers. The only way the United Lalxir Party could be driven out of i New Zealand would bo for the great body of the people of New Zealand \ to abandon their own intelligence I and repudiate their own judgement and betray their own interests. It will be a day or two yet before that programme will bo adopted. While Keir Bardie was touring America in the interests of the Socialist propaganda, » woman in his own country died and willed him 10,000 dollars in trust, to be expended in furthering the labor organisation and education, of Great Britain. The United Labor Party is the only one which demands even-handed justice, no matter who is the offender. The only reason why anybody would over want to own anything would be in order to use it. What a man can use alone—that is the way to own it. If it must be used collectively—that would be the better way to own it. STRIKES FOB EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. "Let me tell him that there never has been a strike lost to the militant section of t'he workers. If we have ever been beaten on the sviot by the masters and 'scabs' it has only helped <XD educate, the working classes throughout tlio world to the principles of industrial .solidarity."—J. Mc.cdonald. The effort to deal with industrial disputes bv conciliation and arbitration through legally constituted machinery created for the purpose lias had a trial of less than twenty vc?.rs. It. is admitted by all the friends of | arbitration that the inevitable eliort- | comings of a new undertaking have hid their full share in the effort to substitute tins regular forms of arbitration proceedings for the irregularities of industrial revolt. "The militant .section cf the workers" have bad one thcuswncl years djirins which time there was no other programme, within the reach of the ' workers in any effort to remedy their Grievances than that of industrial revolt, and here comes a gentleman to declare that in all this time not one such strike has yet been >r<t,\ that * ! the temporary advantages of every " seeming defeat has only hastened the final solidarity.

VICTORIES WHICH ARE DEFEATS. Tt is in the history of strikes tl.nt oxaetly the contrary is the fact. Tf fl . strike is undertaken and is lost, then the strikers are beaten. If a strike ip undertaken and it win?, other strikes immediately follow, the territory covered by strikes, the interests involved in the -strikes are rapidly and enormously enlarged, and the occasion which :>s held to justify a strike becomes constantly more trifling, less innd less important, until tlio 'whole great house of the striking 'Structure tumbles about the ears of those who 'have temporarily succeeded under ia. strike programme. And every such disaster, instead of consolidating labor, has led itself, to the disintegration of labor, to the breaking down of their organisations, and frequently to the hopeless dis- ' cou-ragement of whole generations of those who have been involved in these great encounters. . The. one bit of daylight in all this i racket is that the workers are learning that their civic power as citizens is even greater than their economic. I power as workers. In combining the two they enormously increase their power in industrial revolt, if they shall be found inevitable, hut in industrial legislation they may deliver labor from the extortion of monopoly and Anally making labor itself the supreme authority in the State, a.nd Lio by securing industrial justice they may make" An eoA of all necessity for industrial revolt.