THE COST OF LABOUR WAR.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 103, 30 April 1908, Page 4

THE COST OF LABOUR WAR.

We" venture to direct the attention of the "New Zealand labour leaders and workers who believe in strikes to a short, but interesting, item that appeared yesterday in our cable columns. The strike among the engineers and shipwrighta in the North of England, we are informed, has already cost the men half

a million sterling in loss of wages alone. It is, of course, impossible to calculate the amount of the losses inflicted upon the special trades concerned, and the countless industries more or less directly connected with them. But whether the men are right or wrong, these portentous figures ought to convince most people that the weapon they are using is certain to hurt themselves. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers ought by this time to have learned the danger of strikes as a means of settling industrial disputes. The great engineering strike of 1897 lasted thirty weeks, and in the end the men were compelled to give way. But the society funds alone were reduced by £300,000; levies on outside workers came to another £300,000; and subscriptions from various sources reduced the available wealth of the wage earners in the country by £140,000. The strike payments made to men out of work amounted to £720,000; the loss of wages to the engineers alone was computed at £2,000,000; and the loss of wages in other trades came to at least £1,000,000. The total loss to the workers involved in the strike was thus something between three and a half and four millions sterling. But the loss to the trades, and employers concerned was certainly more than this; and £10,000,----000 is a moderate estimate of what the strike cost the country as a whole. This is by no means a record in strikes; for the great American coal strike seven years ago cost the United States at least £20,000,000 in much less time. But the figures that we have quoted ought to be enough to prove that the strike is a national danger that all communities should endeavour to combat or eliminate, and that, whether they succeed or fail, strikes inevitably inflict the most serious injury upon the workers directly through loss of wages and employment, and indirectly through the crippling of trade and the waste of the country's industrial resources.