STRIKE TO CONTINUE

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25085, 17 January 1947, Page 7

STRIKE TO CONTINUE

Delegates Vote In London HOPES OF UNION SECRETARY (N.Z Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, Jan. 15. The striking transport drivers, at a delegates’ meeting in London, decided by a heavy vote to continue the strike. The secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (Mr Arthur Deakin), at the conclusion of the meeting, said: “The meeting stands adjourned until to-morrow morning, when a further meeting with the strike committee will take place.” He added: “The conference will be recalled for 2 p.m., and I am hopeful that that will bring the business to a close.” Many of the ships affected by the strike of dock workers have cargoes of food from New Zealand, Australia, the Argentine, and the West Indies, says the “Evening News.” Long lines of railway waggons which are waiting to distribute cargoes of sheep and lambs from New Zealand stand by empty. The National Dock Labour Corporation has reported that dock labourer* on strike now number more than 11,000. A number of stevedores ara still working, but it is expected that they too will join the strikers. The workers could not have a Labour Government and at the same time repudiate the trade unions and their leaders, declared Mr Tom O’Brien, a Labour member of the House of Commons arid also a member of the general council of Trade Union Congress, in a spech at Nottingham. Mr O’Brien, who was commenting on the present transport strike, said that a Labour Government could not last alongside a discredited trade union movement. The right, to strike was one of the great liberties of democracy and, like all great liberties, it could be lost by abuse. Nothing menaced the right to strike more than the constant use of strikes by unofficial groups of workers. “I ask workers to ponder the fact that the first Labour Government with power has been forced to use troops in an unofficial strike more than once to save the people’s food. It cannot go on.”