THE STRIKE GERM

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 107, 6 May 1916, Page 6

THE STRIKE GERM

(FROJI OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) SYDNEY, 28tb April. One of our prominent public health officials has remarked in relation to recent outbreaks of cerebrospinal meningitis and infantile paralysis that there will be actual cause for the gravest alarm when the germs of these things become anything like as numerous and virulent as the strike germ in Australia. In connection with our war obligations nothing has been more insistently preached than .the duty of striving for greater efficiency and the highest possible production as regards our industries. But experience positively contradicts the preaching. During the year 1914, as the result of strikes in Australia, there was a loss in wages alone of £500,475. and the loss in working days was 993,153. The sum lost would have paid the interest, on our ten million war loan, with a substantial balance left. The figures for 1915 have not yet been completed, but it is officially recorded that the new industrial disputes in the last quarter of 1915 numbered 149, which was 36 in excess of the largest number recorded in any one quarter during the three preceding years for which such information has been collected.' New and old disputes together entailed a loss during this quarter of over 238,000 working days of more than £120,000 in wages. The whole of the information gathered points to the fact that during, the war period the strikes have exceeded even the extraordinary number' which marked the pre-war period.