FREEZING WORKERS’ DISPUTE

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22004, 30 January 1937, Page 18

FREEZING WORKERS’ DISPUTE

TO THE EDITOR OP THE PRESS. Sir, —The maintenance of this discourse renders coherence possible only round and about the point whether freezing workers, paid and employed, are real or potential champions of unemployed. “J.B” offers a challenge to combat. In general I do not allow any man to ask me twice for any such proper purpose as that. I do, however, make it a condition that my challenger shall be a man of unblemished civil record and that the conditions shall be fair and open. “J. 8.” admits my general position. The employed of Canterbury as a whole (so says his letter) did admirably well. Quite so. He finds only one wicked exception and that exception the very one instance demanded by “John Workless,” supplied by me and quite properly accepted by “John Workless” as irrefutable. Not as answer to “J.B.’s” conditional questions, but in extenso to “John Workless.” I will add that the Trades Council unions and Trades Hall Unemployment Committee pledged their financial support through their then representatives on the Citizens’ Unemployment Committee. Messrs Tim Armstrong and Harry Worrall, and so far as I know, gave it. While there were two opposed organisations of unemployed in Canterbury, and I belonged to only one of I hem (also before and since), the unemployed got many bucket collections from the watersiders (never less than £9), the same from the seamen and the cooks and waiters. My experience in the tramway strike is pot for pub-

lication, except with the consent and approval of the Tramway Union, I repeat that the paid workers’ heart was good (high and low). The employed championed the unemployed (and of course the class cause) in united front, stop-work, mass meetings, and mass demonstrations of outstanding impressiveness. I wanted to recall that.—Yours, etc., SIDNEY H. FOURNIER. January 28, 1937.