MISPLACED INGENUITY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 55, 6 March 1937, Page 8

MISPLACED INGENUITY

Work stoppage may seem a simple end, attainable by one of three methods —dismissal, resignation, or "mutual consent" (meaning a dead heat between resignation and dismissal). Yet in organised cessation of work infinite variety of method is introduced. The Coptic monks of Assuan lock themselves in, pull up the drawbridge, and have food for a two-years' siege. Departmental shop girls in America start a sitdown strike, workers in France and motor-car factory employees in America "stayed in," and miners in Hungary have "stay-in" or "stay-at-home" strikes. There have been "regulation" strikes with workers observing strictly all the rules applying to their occupation, and "goslow" strikes. Indeed, the only novelty today would be a * strike .which did not interrupt work, and that seems beyond the bounds of paradoxical possibility. Yet there is a serious side: if all this ingenuity is devoted to discovering some new way of conducting an industrial quarrel, would the aims of all concerned be not better served by applying the same ingenuity to the settlement of differences? Norman Angell wrote a quarter of a century ago of "The Great Illusion" that any nation could profit by war. The hope of profit from industrial war is also illusory. To cease producing in order to have more is in itself contradictory. This is illustrated, too, by actual facts. The workers in a recent American strike, it was lately reported, though they won concessions, would have to work for years before their gains balanced their strike losses. .