The Dominion SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1921. A NEGLECTED PERIL

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 125, 19 February 1921, Page 6

The Dominion SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1921. A NEGLECTED PERIL

The watersiders, who are apparently determined to bring all work in the ports of the Dominion to a standstill rather than agree to practise fair dealing, cannot, to say the least, be regarded as public > benefactors. Yet in one respect they arc rendering a service to the community which almost entitles them to gratitude. Their action provides an object-lesson which is fulteof instruction for the public, and particularly for their fellow-workers. This action is most remarkable in the completeness with which it inverts the sound principles of trades unionism. The essential purpose of trades union organisation is to enable workers, by concerted action, to better their condition and secure at all times just conditions of work and remuneration. The watersiders obviously arc pursuing no such aims. All things considered, they are better paid than almost any Other class of workers in the Dominion. Not content with this, they arc demanding a higher cost of living bonus than most other workers, including skilled tradesmen, have accepted, and nt the same time arc asserting the right to throw industry on the waterfront out of gear whenever they feel so inclined. Manifestly they are striving. not for fair conditions, but for an unfair advantage and for Lire privilege of exploiting and penalising the rest of the community, and, most of all. their follow-workers. For these ends they arc themselves sacrificing an amount in wages in comparison with which the concession they arc now endeavouring to extort is quite trivial. ’The present trouble on the waterfront perfectly illustrates the sinister perversion of trades union organisation upon which the Welfare League, for some time past has Iteen labouring, not unsuccessfully, In ■ concentrate public attention. The underlying conditions which account for the present upheaval on the ■waterfront were accurately summed up by Mr.. C. P. Stcerrett in the address he delivered on Thursday in opening the second annual conference of the league:

The trouble we have in the Dominion Is that wo have some powerful unions who use the machinery mid the funds and shape the acts of trade unions for an illegitimate purpose —the disruptton of the existing economic system and the control of the industries of the country by the manual worker over everyone else. The ultimate goal of trade unionism to-day under its present leaders is revolution.

The accuracy' of this diagnosis could not be emphasised better than in the action of the watersiders, who, without a shadow of grievance, are abandoning their own highlypaid employment and endangering the employment and welfare of tens of thousands of their fellow-work-ers.

The difficulty hitherto has been not to expose the illegitimate aims and tactics of the so-called militant unions of the Dominion, but to induce an easy-going public to regard these developments seriously. Until recently it seemed almost hopeless to contest or oppose these developments otherwise than by the painstaking process of public education in which the Welfare League lias taken a conspicuous and worthy part. The ruling tendency with a. great many people has been to rest •upon a comfortable belief —in itself perfectly sound—that in a country like this schemes of revolution arc bound sooner or later to die a natural death. The fact has been too commonly overlooked that a democratic community, tolerating and enduring the spread of syndicalist doctrine and practice, is inviting many dangers and calamities short of the final catastrophe which would Be brought upon it by a syndicalist revolution. It is true that the establishment of such a dictatorship as exists in Russia is absolutely impossible in any British community, and that syndicalist or communist adventurers who . attempted to impose such a regime on people of British stock would simply be signing their own death warrants. But there are many gradations between the health and freedom of unspoiled democracy and the conditions of abject slavery to which Lenin and his associates have reduced the Russian masses, and it is only too apparent that in New Zealand wo have been passively tolerating an insidious poisoning of the body politic, and particularly of industrial organisations, which already threatens to produce dire results. In their limited measure, and within their defined opportunities, the men who inspire in this country the policy and tactics of which the watersicters have provided the latest exhibition are true followers of the communists who have brought such a nightmare of horror on Russia. Wo arc now well placed to perceive and realise the folly of allowing these men to proceed almost unopposed with the perversion and degradation of some of the most powerful industrial organisations in the Dominion. That these extremists are, so to speak, in a blind alley, with no hope of attaining their ultimate goal of revolution, is more or less beside the point. It is bad enough that they are able to induce thousands of organised workers to engage in a direct attack upon the rights and welfare of the rest of the community. The people of the Dominion have paid little heed to repeated warnings of the results that would inevitably follow from the spread of revolutionary ideas and syndicalist doctrines. They cannot in the same fashion neglect the object-lesson now provided J>y the watorsiders unless they are content to see every hope of prosperity in. the immediate future vanish. The Dominion no longer lias an assured margin of prosperity to draw upon while its people wait in comfortable apathy for the distempers of syndicalism to evaporate. At the moment we 'fetunate as compared with

almost every other country in our freedom fVom unemployment and related troubles, but unless a really effective stand is taken against the wrecking policy which is being pursued at present by the watersiders it will not be long before these happy’conditions are reversed.