REFORM OR RUIN?

Press, Volume LVII, Issue 17315, 29 November 1921, Page 2

REFORM OR RUIN?

LABOUR LEADER'S WARNING TO LABOT7F (ißOtt OTTR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) LONDON, October 14. It the annual conference of the Textile Institute at Manchester Mr J. R. Gyne9, M.P., delivered the annual Mather lecture, taking as his subject "Industrial Relationships, Reform or Ruin?", If a better spirit was to prevail, he said, two things were essential —one, that employers must abandon j the idea of yielding only to the force of a strike, the other that workmen in every case must honour the bargains which their representatives had made for them, renouncing the tendency to unauthorised strikes, which in every instance had resulted in a very serious loss indeed to the workmen. The law had long recognised the right to strike, but we had the right to do many things which wc did not do because it was better not to do them. The country's future place among the commercial nations of the world njjist depend upon internal industrial peace, and if we could not secure it we should be less able to face the calls which industrial obligation had imposed on us.' Industrial events had powerfully reinforced the plea to avoid extreme industrial action. The factors which the sponsors of it left out of account were clear enough. The community had enormous powers of recuperation and resistance. Men who had thought fchat merely to down tools would bring the community to its knees had been astonished to find the community ready to let the tools stay there till men were willing to pick them up again. He thought that compulsory arbitration, which did not work badly in regard to wages during the war, on tlie false and unjust underlying basis of the workers' cost of living, should be made to work in relation to whatever was the proven value of industry to the community. On the ciuestion of unemployment, I Mr Clynes urged the calling together | of industry, controllers of finance, and th" master minds of trade and commerce, who, if Parliament and the local authorities failed, might provide a remedy, or confess their failure to meet the needs of millions of workmen. Within the trade unions themselves there <vas need for reform, and the red cape grievance, against which the unions railed in Government Departments, was not without comparison in some of the unions themselves.

Speaking on the future of trade, Mr Clynes s ; v.d that goods must be provided within the limits of living capacity of people in foreign lands. Wages were only one «iement in price, and though he did not allege that under no conditions should wages bo diminished, or that under present-day conditions there should not be certain reductions, which would bear some relation to the cost of living, he did assert that trade could not oc recovered meiely by the process of pulling down wages. Employers in tlie main could do little for workmen unless workmen lived up to the old moral motto, "A full dpy's work for a fair day's pay." To evade any service which workmen should perform, or to leave some things undone in the belief that thereby an opening for further employment" was provided, was a delusion which had damaged the interests of the workmen iar more than tae interests of the em-ployt-rs. L'niestruieu output was desirable because it would confer-greater bonctit upon the waggxarning classes than on any ether