PAPERSPAST

INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM

The differences of opinion in New Zealand on the form Industrial Unionism should take give point to the following extracts from an article appearing in "Solidarity": ,

"What do we really mean and understand by scientific industrial organisation,?"

"How shall we bring about Industrial Unionism?"

"Where does one industry begin and where does it end?"

These are some of the questions that arise in considering the subject.

Many pamphlets and articles have been printed dealing with Industrial Unionism, but they have been mostly written from a theoretical and "what ought to be" standpoint. The broad principles are generally understood by intelligent trade unionists—excepting, of course, some officials.

" One Industry, One Union, One Card," has been a slogan for a number of years.

t In Russia they have only twenty-

three unions, and define an industrial union as "Uniting all the workers of a given industry, independent of the particular function they perform."

How shall we apply this principle? Some industrial unionists lay it down that all transport workers, for instance, should belong to one union, with special departments for rail, road, water, and air transport workers

Others say one union for all nailway workers, one for all water transport Avorkers (including dockers, etc.), and so on. „

Which is the best method? Tho position has not yet been seriously tackled from a practical standpoint as applied to British conditions. When we do attempt to apply the principles we begin to realise the terrible tangle we are in.

What is the engineering industry? What should be the position and relationship ot the Electrical Trade Union, which is at present organising all workers employed by electrical undertakings?

How can we overcome the existence of the semi and unskilled workers' unions, which are now strongly amalgamated? How about clerks in trade union offices?

What is the best practical plan that can be adopted to overcome these and many other difficulties, and to commence the construction of a machine that will be capable of waging a successful fight against capitalism, and will be able to cany on production with the least delay after the revolution?

Many of the questions idised aoovu have a certain application here and it is highly desirable that they should be answered satisfactorily. Here is an opportunity for an expression of constructive ideas in industrial unionism of which our readers should avail themselves. We invite them to write us. We make only one stipula-; turn; that the matter should be approached in the spirit of unity and without the hostility usually generaed by the practice of professionally boosting one method at the expense of another.

Click here to view this newspaper article

This text was automatically generated by a computer. It has not been manually reviewed or corrected and may include errors. You can view the article in its original format or read the entire page.

About the computer-generated text

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a process for automatically extracting text from scanned pages. OCR enables searching of large quantities of full-text data, but it is not 100% accurate. The level of accuracy depends on the print quality of the original newspaper and its condition at the time of microfilming. Newspapers with poor quality paper, small print, mixed fonts, multiple column layouts or damaged pages may have poor OCR accuracy.

The page where this item appears has an estimated OCR accuracy of 97.69%.