STRIKE NOTES

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 113, 8 November 1913, Page 6

STRIKE NOTES

BUSINESS PARALYSIS MANY FEELING THE PINCH. The strike is having a serious effect upon the morale of Civil servants and the staffs of business houses and offices, who have now comparatively little to do, and, if they had it, are so unsettled by recent happenings that they cannot give their minds to their work. At any moment a scene of violence and disorder may take place at any spot in the city within the vicinity of the wharves. Again, the carrying out of the duties of special constables makes a heavy demand upon the staffs of all business concerns, employers and their staffs being equally keen and selfsacrificing in their efforts to serve in the cause of upholding law and order and protecting those who have under* takeq, to work the ships. The interruption of intercourse between the North and South Islands and Australia has also had a deadening effect upon business. So far as the retail trade (in other than bare necessaries of life) is concerned, it is decidedly dull, and many shopkeepers are in an extremely pessimistic frame of mind not- only as to the present but aiso as to the future. Other shopkeepers again complain that they are not at present making rent, and it is quite within tho range of possibility that many will be compelled to shorten hands in tho immediate future if the strike does; not soon end. Small property owners whose incomes aro wholly or in part made up of small house-rents are already feeling tho pinch by reason of the stoppage of payment of rent.