AUSTRALIAN SHIP DISPUTE

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26122, 26 May 1950, Page 7

AUSTRALIAN SHIP DISPUTE

Seamen Logged By Employers

UNAUTHORISED MEETINGS

(Rec. 10 p.m.) SYDNEY, May 25. Seamen in all Australian ports today were logged and fined by the masters of their ships for taking part yesterday in unauthorised stop-work meetings to discuss the Federal Government’s Communist Party Dissolution Bill.

The first retaliation by the seamen occurred in Melbourne, where seamen walked off a Commonwealth-owned ship, the River Glenelg, and others refused to move the steamer Age. Seamen in other ports have not followed the Melbourne lead. The Victorian branch of the Seamen’s Union has asked the Australian Steamship Owners' Federation lor permission to hold a further stop-work meeting. The Melbourne seamen were the only ones who carried out the Seamen’s Union threat to tie up ships immediately unionists were logged. The stop-work meetings yesterday decided that no seamen would work if any loggings were made. Commenting on the seamen’s threatened action, the "Sydney Morning Herald" recalls that, during the debate on the Communist Party Dissolution Bill in the Hoqse of Representatives, Mr J. S. Rosevear (Labour) said: “The fun will start when the Government starts to dictate to the trade unions who their officers shall be.” “The miscalled fun has started already. as far as the Seamen's Union is concerned,” continues the newspaper. “This Communist-led organisation has not waited for the enactment of the measure, or for any subsequent action against its Red officials. "The seamen have served notice that they will defy and resist the law now being considered by the Commonwealth Parliament. By resolution—a resolution bearing the familiar marks of Communist Party authorship—they proclaimed themselves as a leading militant organisation to give a lead in ‘the struggle against the enemies of the working class and their antiworking oiass legislation.’ “What this jargon means is that the seamen intend to use their industrial strength for political purposes, and to provoke as much disruption as they can under the pretext of protecting the trade union movement. “The fact that a very considerable section of the movement feels itself in need of protection and liberaUon from Communist domination is ignored by the Senmen's Union, though it was made plain at last week’s congress of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.”