Seamen will vote today on Karepo

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33814, 10 April 1975, Page 2

Seamen will vote today on Karepo

New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND. April 9. Seamen will meet in all main ports tomorrow to decide the union’s attitude in the present storm over the continued failure of the Islands trader Karepo to find a crew.

The union is on the brink of deregistration, with the Karepo still stuck in Auckland after three weeks and the Union Auckland crew on sympathy strike in Mount Maupganui.

The union members will have to decide whether to order the crew of the Karepo to sign on and take the ship to sea.

At similar stop-work meetings on Monday the members voted in support of a recommendation from the national council that seamen come forward in answer to the call for a crew for the ship.

On Tuesday the existing crew of the Karepo duly came forward in answer to the call for seamen, but they refused to sign on and go to sea until bad discharges entered against them in the log were removed.

There was apparently some confusion whether the resolution of the stop-work meetings was in fact a directive not just to provide a crew but also to sign on and go to sea.

The stop-work meetings tomorrow will be asked to spell out the position clearly. If the crew of the Karepo is told to man the ship and go to sea it is believed they have given an undertaking to do so.

Defiance of the decision of the rank and file of the union would leave the crew completely isolated. On the other hand, if the stop-work meetings decide that the Karepo should remain strike-bound, then deregistration of the union or at the very least its Auck-

land branch is obviously a distinct possibility. Complicating the issue is the fact that the union president. Mr D. J. Morgan, appeared in the Wellington Magistrate’s Court today and the acting assistant Auckland secretary. Mr J. O’Neill, will appear in the Auckland Magistrate's Court tomorrow, facing charges under the Shipping and Seamen’s Act, arising from the dispute.

As well, the Government has introduced a mandatory roster system. Both these moves are bitterly opposed by seamen, and have aroused a great deal of emotion. The leaders of the union are. however, desperately anxious not to give the Gov'emment an excuse to deregister their organisation, and probably to refuse to readmit [supposed-troublemakers to a -new union.

An indication that opinion among seamen is behind the national council’s stand came today when the Islands freighter Luhesand sailed from Auckland, in spite of fears that the crew would stage a sympathy strike. It seems likely that the Karepo will put to sea on Friday. That would give the union breathing space to press the claims of the crew and to campaign against the prosecutions and the compulsory roster, without having the threat of deregistration looming quite so closely.

Books surprise.— Eyebrows were raised at a New Plymouth intermediate school this week at the response to an appeal to parents to give books to the school library. Among the books which came forward were “The Happy Hooker” and “The Erotic Woman.”—(P.A.)