STRIKE AT HUNTLY.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 100, 24 October 1913, Page 4

STRIKE AT HUNTLY.

MR. SEMPLE'S UNOFFICIAL VISIT UNEASY FEELING TAKEN ROOT. [BI TELEGRAPH — SPECIAL TO THE POST.] HUNTLY, This Day. The fact that Mr. Semple, organiser of the United Federation of Labour, did not come to Huntly in his official capacity robbed his visit of a good deal of interest that would otherwise been attached to it. His statement that he was sure the United Federation of Labour would endorse the action taken by the Huntly meh is so far the only intimation that has been made that the larger organisation will come into the matter. He repudiates the imputation that any outside influence has been brought to bear on Huntly, where the Miners' Union control its own affairs under an award of Arbitration Court. The present crisis has been reached by individual action of the union through its belief that unfair discrimination had been shown in the dismissal of the sixteen men. Some familiarity with the Huntly of to-day (an entirely different Huntly from the Huntly of a year ago, so far as all the attributes of a domesticated community ai'e concerned) leads to the conclusion that an uneasy feeling has taken root very widely. " A man never knows when it will be his turn," said a miner, who had taken a spell from hoeing his potatoes to discuss the situation in a dispirited way with the Post reporter. " The practice here," he went on, "has been for mines to work short hours when the slack season came on. The situation soon righted itself, because young men, when they found they Couldn t make v their wages go much more than meet boarding expenses, left the town to look for work elsewhere. We have always had a floating population of that kind; men who have no ties in the place and who stay only while they can make good money. There are no " Red Feds/' here now ; we are all arbitrationists, 'and we had hoped we would have a decent spell of peace and reasonably steady work." STATUS OF THE UNION. There appears still to be much misunderstanding as to the status of the Huntly Miners' Union in the ranks of organised Labour. ' Strangers who como into Huntly breezily assume that in some unexplained say the "Feds" are on the warpath again. It does not seem to be generafly understood that tliere y is now no Federation of Labour. That old institution, which was composed solely of anti-arbitration unions, that is of unions which were not registered under the Arbitration Act, was absorbed in July last in the United Federation of Labour, which comprises all those unions registered and unregistered which adopted the basis of unity set forth at the big Labour Congress in July last. The Huntly Miners' Union is one or these unions. It was formed and registered in October last year, after the company had refused to have any further dealings with the old Waikato Miners' Union, when the latter body, in obedience to the then existing Federation of Labour, broke its agreement with the company by celebrating a holiday as a^mark of sympathy with the Waihi strikers who went to gaol rather than give sureties to keep the peace. The new Arbitration union got its first award in the form of an industrial agreement with compulsory preference clause in 'November of last year. The term y^as for three years. Not all the members of the old union were accepted as members, of the new union, the action being, it was believed, justified by experience of the previous settlement under the old regime. There was some bitterness at the time of the readjustment of relations between the company and the mine workers, and the uneasiness which culminated in the present strike is rightly or wrongly a relic of the feeling that the action of the past have not been forgotten or forgiven. Men stick stubbornly to their belief that the fourteen new men taken on by the company, though admittedly only truckers, were to replace other truckers promoted to fill the vacancies caused by the dismissal of experienced miners, nine of them being married and with homes in Huntly.