The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. TUESDAY, JUNE 14, 1932. UNIONISM AND THRIFT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 139, 14 June 1932, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

TUESDAY, JUNE 14, 1932. UNIONISM AND THRIFT.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that teg can do.

It is unfortunate for the Council of the English Trade Union Congress that its condemnation of schemes among workers for thrift and co-operation with Capital should be followed within a few days by fresh proof of the amazing growth of the National Savings movement. Doubtless the Congress would say | that the increase in what the chairman of the National Savings Committee classes as "small [ savings," from £492,000,000 in 1911 to £2,244,000,000 in 1931, showed most clearly the need for its protest. But this trade union i report, absurd though it may seem to many, deserves a little attention. The Congress condemns welfare schemes as "exerting an insidious influence which definitely tends to weaken the trades unions," and considers that "the more financial interest workers arc induced to have in a firm the greater will be their reluctance in any way to endanger the firm's profit-making activities" —that is to say, to go on strike. To some people this attitude may seem extraordinary, but it is one that is well known to students of the trade union and Socialist movements. One may hear from Socialist lips the strongest language about ! philanthropic employers like the Cadburys, who have made Bournvillc one of the modern industrial garden cities of the world. The Cadburys, and others like them, arc considered to be doping the proletariat, injecting a drug that deadens precious class consciousness. The capitalist is between two fires. - If he does nothing for his workers he is greedy and unsympathetic. If he helps them, lie is only trying to deceive. It must be conceded that from the strictly unionist point of view there is a great deal in these contentions. The worker does become more contented if he is well treated, and if he is a shareholder in the company by which he is employed he will certainly be less inclined to strike than a man with no stake in the concern save his wages. Remembering what trade unionism has won for the wage-earner, one should not be entirely without sympathy when one studies this apprehension about the weakening of union solidarity and energy. What is really involved, however, is an economic change of enormous importance. The wage-earner's conditions have been enormously improved, and in the process he has become a capitalist. His savings in many countries amount to a vast sum, and they are so woven into the fabric of the economic system that it would be impossible to destroy capitalism without destroying this property of the class for whose benefit the destruction had been decreed. Wealth is very much more widely distributed than many critics of the present system are prepared to admit. Perhaps Mr. Lang, with the election results before him, is considering this change. There are more than two and a half million holders of insurance policies in Australia, and over five million savings bank accounts. Mr. Lang caused one savings bank to close its doors, and proposed to tax the mortgage investments of insurance companies. Perhaps Mr. Lang agrees with the T.U.C. about the immorality of thrift schemes.