CORRESPONDENCE WATERSIDE TALLY CLERKS

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 71, 25 March 1914, Page 3

CORRESPONDENCE WATERSIDE TALLY CLERKS

10 THE EDITOR. Sir, — lii yor.v published interview with Mi. l''uujca;d, president of the Tally Clerko' Tj'iion, time is one statement with which I am in entire agreement, i.e., Hut the public ought to bn placed in possession of both sides of the question. , Mr. Foucard omitted to mention that the Tally Clerks' Union vas brought into being during the tir&t lew days of the strike, a press item informing all and 'sundry that such was being formed, and that the said union had decided to throw in its lot with the strikers. Ab this press statement remained uncontradicted by, the prime movers in the union-forming, it was natuially taken for granted that some agreement with the Red Federation had been come to. Mr. Foucard, therefore, takes part of the onus accruing from what the masters might term "an unfriendly act." To prove that the shipping companies were hot averse to an arbitration union formed under normal conditions, 1 may state that when the above-mentioned press item was brought to the notipe of a prominent shipping agent, he advised that fifteen of the bona tide tally clerks should form a union under the Arbitration Act. That sound advice was, unfortunately, not acted upon. The antagonism of the bona fide tally clerks is due to the conditions under which tho union was formed, and to Us executive, which is manifestly unrepiesentative, as Mr Foucard's own figures an^jly prove; for not one of "the forty" belongs to the union. The forty preference clerks in contradistinction to the seventy "convenience" clerks that he quotes, might score a point with the uninitiated ; but the majority of the seventy, like the " sti ike-breakero '' horn the country, did not come to stay. Rush tiipes let them in. Probably 4000 men have worked on the wharf on and off since the strike was broken,' but 1500 is easily the limit that, can hope to make a continuous living there, and out of that 1500 there i 3, and must be, a goodly proportion of preference men who get taken on first in the respective companies they " follow " What makes for permanent against casual employment in any wahVof life but preference to those whom an empkyw thinks suitable to his particular use? One could,, with as much reason, ask that all the employable in,. any capacity be congregated at certai'i places each morning in Wellington, according to occupation, and be called off by their respective employers A casual worker must always have a grievance against the more fortunate permanent, but the remedy is surely not to make everybody casual workers. This, however, appears to be Mr. Fouqird's ideal of equity, now that he has been deleted from the ranks of the so-called permanent. — I am, etc., INTERESTED.