Grey River Argus and Blackball News WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28, 1922. MORE BIG UNIONS.

Grey River Argus, 28 June 1922, Page 4

Grey River Argus and Blackball News

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28, 1922. MORE BIG UNIONS.

Delivered every mo. nitiM In Gr iuth. K Huki'.ika, Dobson, Wallsend, Taylu. alle, Ngahere. Blackball, Nelson Creek. Brunner, Te Kiugha kototnanu, Poerua, Inchbonrue, Patara, Ruru, Kaimata, Kotukv- Mojna. Aratika, Buiianga, Duuollie. Cobden. Baxter s, Kokiri, Ahaura, Ikamatua, Stulwaxer, Waiuta, Reefton, Ross, Ruatapua, Mananui, Hari Hart, Waiho Gorge, Weheka, Rewanui, Otira, liujngahua Junction; Westport. Waimangar-ja, Denniston, Granity, Millerton. Ngakawau. Hector, Seddon villi). Cape Foul wind, and Karames.

It is as interesting as it is significant to find the employers openly acknowledging and operating their on-c big union in New South Wales. The shearers’ dispute has been responsible, and a cable says the primary “producers” (whose interest in production is generally anything up to 50 per cent per annum) joining to fight tho worker as one mass. All the elements of a great industrial struggle are appearing in Australia, and may soon do likewise here. The Arbitration Courts are suspect and the employers are ready io drop them in order to have a free fight so as to force wages down further. The amount of pay in dispute with the shearers is petty from the •employers’ standpoint, but they are looking ahead. The coal dispute discloses the employers making outrageous demands. The secretary of the Australian Miners’ Federation instances the Broken Hill Proprietary, a gigantic monopoly, which is pleading poverty in order to sweat its workers, but which has in fact been stuffing 521 per cent net profit on its full capital into its

shareholders’ pockets. It has averaged 5i millions in four years. The Federal Arbitration Court is certainly proving obsolete. Its recent decision in the gas workers case, where the basic wage was fixed at 2/- per week below the statistician’s figures, has provoked a feeling of hostility. Its cost of living figures are not reliable. It has just reduced tho skill margin for engineers from the margin of 6/to 4/- per day, presumably because 3500 engineers were idle in tho country and thus all the employers’ talk about desiring to pay skill adequately proves to be bumkuni because they back the Court. In this country, as in N.S.W. the system may be changed next session for the worse. In N.S.W. the Board of Trade in its present form will go and the principle of a universal basic wage will be altered, and the Industrial Court will prescribe the wages in each industry. Drastic apprenticeship regulations have been held up, and the Tory Cabinet aims event-

ually to abolish the Court entirely also ending the present basic wage system, whereby the declaration of the Board of Trade has to be accepted by the Industrial Court as the universal standard, irrespective of the ability or inability of any industry to pay the standard wage. One result of this alteration will bo that if the Government wishes to place a large number of unemployed in relief works at a reduced wage, it will be able to do bo. At present the unemployed caiindt be given work except at the basic wage. It would seem that New South Wales employers big union is only a natural' development under capitalism. As in war so in pence. Organisation in industry means a tremendous advantage over adversaries. So we had it before the war that combines were organising themselves into trusts, and trusts into super-trusts. What is a nation during a war but a gigantic trust of trusts industrially Let a nation go to war with a rival and what is termed patriotism demands that the inevitable antagonism of rich and poor should be forgotten, that a democracy should increasingly merge itself into an autocracy, that the workers should sec all the incidents of the struggle with tho same eye as their industrial masters, and the voices of dissension be stilled. This is the age of tenser industrial unity. There is a rage for organisation. Not only are trusts, industrial and financial, merging into greater bodies, but when the organisation of the workers answers with a demonstration of strength there is a counter display that gives us the fact that capitalism within any given nation is a class trust of trusts. It operates all the time more or less secretly as a political power. But it is in industrial crises that all its fighting weapons are bared. So we see it now in Australia and may do so here next year.