FREEZING WORKERS’ DISPUTE

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22005, 1 February 1937, Page 15

FREEZING WORKERS’ DISPUTE

TO THE EDITOB OF THE POTSS.

Sir,— Replying to Sidney H. Fournier. (1.) Whether freezing workers, paid and employed, are real or potential champions of unemployed. I say that the freezing workers as an organised body, have always held place with the waterside workers, seamen, and the hotel workers in readily assisting the unemployed, and when their organisation became defunct in operation, the individual freezing worker either as an unemployed man or engaged in another calling has, generally speaking, mainly assisted all militant action on behalf of the unemployed. (2 ) S H. Fournier accepts my challenge on condition "that I am 'a mani of unblemished civil record" and that the conditions shall be fair and open. Ye gods! What a sample of trade union bureaucracy! Here is a man, prtf£ssedly one of us unemployed, who ha? persistently criticised the Government on its inquisitiveness about a person s past as demonstrated on its U.B. forms, on which applications are made for relief, and who has demanded relief depots to be thrown open willy nilly, without enquiry, asking for a reserved defence. 1 did not say the whole of Canterbury did very well; I repeat that the unorganised factory workers gave freely and consistently, whereas the trades unions in the main failed. In answer to a further comment, "That the Trades Union Council and Trades Hall Unemployment Committee pledged their support through their then representatives on the Citizens Unemployed Committee, Messrs T. Armstrong, and Harry Worrall," and so far as Mr Fournier knows gave it, there is a great difference between theory and practice. Pledges are not one iota of consequence without being carried out. They are nothing more than a dishonest promissory note. Mr Fournier knows during the preliminaries of last election, when every Labour candidate from the Trade Union ranks was asked, "Are you in favour of giving effect to the 1930 Unemployment Act respecting sustenance and relief pay pending the depression?" their answer was definitely "Yes." That is a moral pledge Has it been carried out? So much for trade union pledges. Mr Fournier states that he belonged to only one unemployed organisation in Canterbury. Might I correct him by saying that he only belonged to one at a time. I must, in fairness, apologise to the Lyttelton Waterside Workers' Union, the Seamen's Union, and the Hotel and Restaurant Workers' Union for leaving an impression that they were backward in their support of the unemployed. Mr Fournier has picked the only three that did assist. But strange to say none of them are domiciled in the Trades Hall. My friend slides on the tramway strike episode, one of the main testing points of trade unions' solidity to tr e unemployed in Canterbury, and \hich goes down in the history of the class struggle. I am not endeavouring to belittle the efforts of some of the trades unions about their financial support of the unemployed, because by the time the secretaries drew their "uncut" salaries from their finances, there was nothing left for the rank and file to vote to the unemployed. But I refer to the moral leadership—money does not always count, even in the struggle of the unemployed to became respectable citizens. Our struggle to-day is to sift the chameleon from the butterfly in the national struggle and strange to say at this juncture we have nests of chameleons both industrial and political right here in Canterbury.—Yours, etc., J.B. l January 31, 1937.