STRIKING AT BOTH ENDS

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 74, 28 March 1914, Page 4

STRIKING AT BOTH ENDS

Sydney is providing another phase of the " vicious circle " movement — the eternal race between price and wage, in which price always seems to win. Usually organised labour is content with forcing up the wage or cutting down the hours, either by Arbitration Court action or by strikes, frequently illegal. After the concession is won, and is duly passed by the employer on to the consumers—who are mostly workersorganised labour has generally contented itself with a verbal protest, alleging that the increase in price is much greater than the increase of wage ; and there, as a rule, the issue rests until some fresh move is made along the old circular course. Now, however, new methods are being adopted. The other day several Sydney unions were striking to raise the wages and reduce" the hours of the retail operative butchers; to-day it is announced that the Sydney wharf labourers will strike at the other end, and will refuse to handle frozen meat for export "until the prices of the locai trade have been reduced to the normal level." Underlying this is a shrewd design to enlist the sympathy of the public as consumers. Labour's case is that the remuneration of labour bears no fair ratio to the profits exacted from the people. But that is a question that could be decided only by thorough economic investigation. Events in Australia all tend towards a more comprehensive system of arbitration, which will take into consideration profits and prices as well as wages and hours. When Labour adopts the policy of forcing up wages at one end, and, at the other end, of restricting sales — for that is what a strike against export amounts to — it is time to see that industry is not crushed between the upper and the nether mill-stone. New South Wales has a right to be delivered from meat rings, if they exist, but a blow to the export trade would strike every class of the community. Who wants to go back to the days when butter was j sixpence a pound?