A LABOUR VIEW.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 16 September 1913, Page 4

A LABOUR VIEW.

Nobody> ;,expected that the Conciliation- and~ Arbitration Act Amendment Bill, .which is primarily designed to minimise the danger of strides and labour upheavals generally, would be approved by the Social-Democratic party. Hence it is not surprising that Mr W. T. Mills,« the organiser for the new party, should give .expression, to the following views concerning it: — '■-■.

- "It is an effort to write into law a policy of maintaining division in the ranks of organised /Labour, and to make industrial solidarity an in/ dustrial crime so far as the workers are concerned. But it leaves the employers free to combine and support each other in financial and other ways without interference, prohibition, or penalty. It attempts to deprive Labour of rights secured through 300 years of industrial strife, and to restore the old penal ; offences which were tried out 300 years agip, and in spite of which the- whole modern world of industrial progress has been brought about. If these repressive laws Were unable to kill British trade unionism when'it was in its infancy, the present Government ought to be better advised than'/to attempt to use such weapons in this battle against trade unions. It is inconceivable that the Bill should be passed. If it be passed, then those of us who are struggling for a peaceful adjustment of industrial disputes and for the civil rights of the workers' wall be subjected to no end of trouble, not only through the interference of courts in a programme that we cannot and will not abandon, but also through the sabotage, destruction of property, disorder and rioting, and other such weapons which are always brought into use by the oppressed when denied any other expression of their .claims for advancement."