STRIKES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 87, 14 April 1941, Page 6

STRIKES.

Scarcely a week passes without a strike somewhere in New Zealand, generally on some trivial issue which should readily be solved without the stoppage of essential industry or without resort to methods beyond the scope of the arbitration law until all means within the law have failed. Unfortunately, while the slightest infraction of any industrial award or agreement by the employer is punished with the utmost severity the same award is brushed aside with utter contempt whenever a union, or even a small section of a union, feels that it has a slight grievance. The result is sabotage of the war effort by shortages which should never be felt, and reduction in the food supplies of the men who in England live in daily peril that we, heedless of their hard rations, may enjoy the 40-hour week. These strikes and stop-work meetings are permitted to go on andi on by the Government and the Labour Department, and union secretaries are encouraged to call them by the knowledge that the most flagTant breach of the Arbitration Act on their part will go unnoticed and j unpunished. The appalling contrast between our war effort and that of [England and of heroic Greece is

| strikingly exemplified by a quotation j from the New Zealand official war correspondent's latest dispatch. "The j New Zealanders," he says, "have been timazed and deeply impressed by the wholehearted intensity of the Greek Avar effort. In fields and towns, every member of the community seems to be bearing with cheerful fortitude the extra burden of work, which must be shared among them as the result of the devotion of manpower to the rout of the enemies. Even in the humblest peasant folk the war has thrown into striking relief qualities of nobility and endurance which make New 1 I Zealanders proud to stand beside 'them in the common cause." Qualities J of nobility, and endurance! Contrast I those qualities with the mean and I petty causes underlying the scores of j labour disputes which have disgraced the war effort of this Dominion.