THURSDAY, MAY 14, 1903. THE VICTORIAN STRIKE

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 20, 14 May 1903, Page 17

THURSDAY, MAY 14, 1903. THE VICTORIAN STRIKE

UR neighbors beyond the Tasman Sea in Victoria are passing through a strange and eventful experience. A railway strike is at present in fall swing in the State. In one vital respect it is, perhaps, the most remarkable strike on record, for it has no association with questions of wages or the direct conditions of labor. Its history is soon told. Last year the Victorian Government found it necessary to draw upon ' the poor man's mint,' economy. Retrenchment became the order of the day. The wages of the public servants were reduced. Four of the railway employes' unions — numbering some 12,000 men, with funds amounting to £72,000 — subsequently affiliated with the Trades Hall. All went well bill January 19, when the Commissioner of Railways issued a notification that their action was a violation of the purpose and spirit of Regulation No. 33, which enacts that ' no employe shall be a member of a political association of any kind.' The unions were not, however, disposed to break with the Trades Hall, and there, for the moment, the matter lay. Some weeks ago they were again called upon by the Government to sever their connection with the 'lrades Hall. The unions formally refused to do so, disputed the Commissioner's interpretation of the Regulation, denied that the Trades Hall was 4 a political association,' and questioned, in the circumstances, the legal power of dismissal which the Government threatened to exercise. Then followed ao ultimatum, threatening the members of the unions with summary dismissal unless the order of withdrawal was obeyed by last Tuesday. The reply was a counter-ultimatum, notifying the Government that, unless they withdrew the order against affiliation to the Trades Hall, the unions would go out on strike. The notification went unheeded, and at the appointed hour — the stroke of midnight, on Friday — the men on duty went out. The threatened strike was at once in full blast.

The strike of cabmen in Naples and of tram-drivers in Antwerp two years ago produced keen local discomfort and embarrassment. And last year's great coal strike in the United brought about sharp distress when the unsparing cold of winter extended its domain over the central and northern towns and cities of the United States. These and such-like labor wars gave trade and industry an uneasy limp. They did not ciipple it outright. But the closing of the throttle-valve on the last railway engine at the witching hour on Friday night at once dislocated almost the whole machinery of Victoria's commerce. Like New South Wales, Victoria is (as anatomists would say) megalocephalous — it has an overgrown head. It presents what is to the political economist the disquieting enormity of having close on half of its population of 1,200,000 souls gathered together in the one city of Melbourne. The State

lives, moves, and has its being chiefly for Melbourne To Melbourne ninety-eight hundredth* of its sea-borne traffic come. To Melbourne all its railway lines converge. They spread out like the rays of a geometrical spider's web for 3228 miles over the State. They are the feeding-tubes through which Mallee wheat, Western District sheep and cattle, Koroit potatoes, Goulburn Valley wine, Portland and Lakes Entrance fish, and butter, milk, eggs, fruit, and vegetables from a hundred various places, are poured into the mouth of the metropolis. And they carry back many of the necessaries and comforts aud luxuries of life to the inland population. The reader can thus see how much Victoria and its metropolis depend alike for the means of subsistence on a fairly efficient railway service.

Thus far the Victorian Government has been unable to carry out even the greatly reduced and straggling railway service which it proposed, and is still hoping and striving, to establish. In the inland towns and the country districts the position is one of much alarm, and in many places famine prices already rule. As for Melbourne : it is partially cut off from its customary supplies. Meat has soared to double prices. Fish is not procurable. The price of other food stuffs and the cost of living have gone up with a bound. People 'cannot live, lrke woodcocks, upon suction.' And unless a way out of the difficulty soon comes — either by a cessation of the strike or by the organisation of an effective railway service— Melbourne may find itself in a position which would recall the early weeks of the siege of Paris. The stoppage of railway traffic in Victoria has already resulted in serious reduction of the work done in warehouses, shops, and factories, and the consequent dismissal of great numbers of hands goes to swell the troubles and increase the dangers of a situation that is as distressful as it is unique. A suspension of labor that affects so wide an area, such pressing needs, aud such an all-embracing circle of interests cannot, however, endure for long. Even at this early stage of the strike the situation is intolerable. The outlook is a little more hopeful as we write, and we trust that an amicable solution of the difficulty will be arrived at without needless bitterness or delay.

Victoria's difficulty throws into strong relief the security which our Conciliation and Arbitration laws have given to the trade and industry in New Zealand. The price we pay for immunity from strikes is no more than a State insurance against the calamities that lmve befallen our Australian neighbors from time to time, and which are in varying degrees chronic in the United States. r J here is a growing disposition to avoid strikes by the sane and common-sense resort of conciliation. In this respect New Zealand easily leads the way. France, Belgium, and Germany have legal Conciliation Boards (known in the two first-mentioned countries as ' Conseils de Prud 1 homines.') They are courts composed of employers and workers, and they effect cheap, prompt, and amicable settlements of disputes respecting past contracts. But they have not the power that our Conciliation Boards and Arbitration Courts legally possess of determining contentions regarding future wages and terms of employment. England and America have not advansed even this little way on the road to industrial peace. Both have, here and there, Hoards of Conciliation and Arbitration. In England these have been able to arrange wages disputes in various manufactures, and even to draw up ' sliding scales ' for the complicated details of the Nottingham hosiery trade and for the fluctuating iron industries of the North. They are valuable, as showing to an incredulous age how conciliation and arbitration can allay social antagonism between capital and labor. But without the power of legal compulsion at their back they are precarious in their operation and likely to be abandoned at any moment.

Belgium was once aptly described as the cock-pit of Europe. And Fngland and America are, and long have been, the cock-pits of the forms of industrial war known as strikes and lock-outs. In England, from 1890 to 1895, these averaged 878 a year and the hands involved counted 392,000. In the one year 1897 there were 864: strikes. They affected 230,300 operatives, and involved a loss of labor amounting to 10,000,000 days — being an average of 43

days for each person on strike. The great dispute in the British engineering trades in 1897-1898 directly affected 47,500 men for an average of 144 days each, thus causing a loss of some 6,850,000 days' labor. Some idea of the dislocation of industry and distress indirectly caused by this memorable strike may be gained from the fact that (according to the Board of Trade Report) ' the percentage of unemployed members in trade unions of the ship-building group rose from 4.4 per cent, in July to 14.1 per cent, in December,' 1897. In the matter of strikes, as m many other big things, America can easily claim the world's record. 'In 14 years, ending 1804,' fF.US I**™*1 **™* ' there were 14, 390 strikes [in the United States], involving 3,714,000 operatives, and causing a loss of £59,300,000 sterling. In 44 per cent, of strikes the operatives succeeded, at a loss of £39,500,000 ; the masters loss was £19,800.000. The loss to each workman on strike- averaged £10 ss ; each strike cost £1400 to TUS?? T 6 ? T and a half years— fiom January 1, 1887 to the end of June, 1894— the four cities of New York, Chicago, Pittsburg, and Philadelphia had an annual average of 104,000 workers on strike, and the yearly loss amounted to £1,840,000. The great coal-miners' strike of 1897 involved about 157,000 men. The New England cotton strike of the following year affected 125,000 operatives. One hundred and twelve thousand men laid down their tools three years ago when the anthracite coal miners went out on strike in Pennsylvania. And last year's great coal war in the United States threw over 300,000 men out of employment and created keen distress and embarrassment m every part of the Union. The poet has described the war of lethal weapons as * toil and trouble.' But non-toil is a weapon capable of producing trouble as widespread as that of war, and not many degrees less intense. The remarkable struggle in Victoria will, we trmfc, have the result of giving a fresh and practical impetus to conciliatory methods in labor disputes and lead to the speedy adoption of those legal enactments which have made New Zealand a land without strikes.