Policy Of Trades Council Attacked

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31595, 5 February 1968, Page 14

Policy Of Trades Council Attacked

The . Canterbury Trades Council’s announced intention of setting up a “genuine” organisation of unemployed persons in Christchurch, to work in association with the council, has been described by Mr G. M. Edmonds as a policy of “divide and wreck.”

This policy, said Mr Edmonds, so often occurred when any humanitarian effort was made “the plaything for party politics.” Mr Edmonds, who is secretary of an existing Canterbury Organisation for the Unemployed, said yesterday: “Many unemployed are desperate and despondent, and can fall easy prey to inflammatory extremists, to the detriment of the majority of unemployed people.” Challenge

Mr Edmonds said he challenged Mr R. A. Hill, president of the Canterbury Trades Council, to prove an allegation that he (Mr Edmonds) had ever said that union secretaries were demanding union fees from unemployed. “But I will repeat," said Mr Edmonds “that union fees were demanded from men sent to work for the Catchment and Nassella Tussock Boards.”

In the light of recent history, Mr Hill's assertion that “certain people are trying to use the unemployment organisation for their own political theories and dreams” made comical reading. “In the best interests of all the unemployed, who represent all political shades of thought and opinion, I have striven to keep our organisation away from the dominance of any one political group, in-

eluding Mr Hill’s,” said Mr Edmonds. “It was the decision of the unemployed themselves to change their meeting-place from the Trades Hall, where they were being subjected to a bombardment of speakers and literature from one particular group, to the Centennial Hall, where they had a guarantee that they would be free from any political party indoctrination and brainwashing,” Mr Edmonds said. “Mischievous Statements”

The Trades Council, he said, was represented on the executive of the Canterbury Organisation for the Unemployed by Mr G. G. Walker, who should have been consulted before Mr Hill made his statement.

“If certain members of the Trades Council have become so thin-skinned that they cannot tolerate fair criticism, I suggest they take consolation in the thought that there has never been a house that has not needed to be put in order every now and then,” Mr Edmonds said.

“The growing numbers of unemployed persons, although a fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of abstract political ideologies, prefer a more immediatte and practical solution to their problems,” he said. “This is exactly wb/it our organisation is trying to do.”