AUSTRALIAN COAL STRIKE

Grey River Argus, 17 April 1940, Page 4

AUSTRALIAN COAL STRIKE

Effects More Serious CURTAILED TRANSPORT SERVICES. • SYDNEY. April 3. The practically nation-wide strike of coal miners to obtain redress of alleged grievances arising from their last Arbitration’ Court award, has now been in progress three weeks and is beginning to have severe effects on the community, as a result of the refusal of owners and men to confer. The strike is retarding the national war effort. Perhaps the most. serious effect so far has been the curtailment of steel production, which is essential to normal Australian development of its munitions and other war-time programmes. Five thousand men have already been dismissed from branches of. the B.H.P. works at Newcastle and 3,000 from the Australian Iron and Steel Mills at Port Kembla. Many subsidiary industries at those centres have also been affected. The number of coal miners on strike is 23,000. Fortyeight vessels are laid up on the Australian coast, involving the signingoff of 1900 seamen.

’j Victorian railway services have , 1 been drastically curtailed for more than a week. The New South , Wales services will be reduced from Sunday. Long-distance mail, goods, and other trains will not run, and all lines in the more thickly-populated areas with steam trains will be on a reduced basis. This will mean temporary unemployment for thousands of railwaymen. Sydney and Newcastle tramways services will be cut 50 per cent, as J from “Monday next, except in peak hours. Some so-called “sectional” services will be eliminated. Omni-1 buses, as far as possible, will be used on tramway routes to dispense with trams. The ships mostly affected are mainly carriers of coal and iron, but some of those out of commission transport general cargo. Among them are those in the potato trade be- ; tween Tasmania and Sydney, and an acute shortage of potatoes is expected. The Federal Government has resolutely .refused to intervene in the coal mining dispute, declaring that the Arbitration Court is the body to which the miners should refer their claims. With one of the judges on military duty and another unavailable because he was the owners’ counsel before appointment to the Court, only the Chief Judge, Sir

George Beeby, is available to hear the claims and the miners object to his hearing them. The Government, nevertheless, declares that the Court is properly constituted, and has persistent refusal to do so. It is apparently the Government’s plan to make the strike a trial of strength between constituted authority and the industrial strike weapon, especially in view of growing Communist influence in the Miners’ Federation, and, possibly, with an eye on strengthening its case in the anti-Red issue that seems likely to influence the election due later this year. Meanwhile, the public suffers because of the Government’s failure to i cope with what one of the Ministers, Sir Frederick Stewart, has called an

“impossible situation.” The State Government is anxiously, but powerlessly, awaiting a settlement, if only because the strike is costing it £20,000 a week and threatens to knock askew all its efforts to live within its budgetary framework. CONFERENCE SUGGESTED. BY MINERS’ UNIONS. SYDNEY, April 13. It was announced, on behalf of the combined mining unions, that if the Federal Government or the Federal Arbitration Court convened a compulsory conference to settle the coal strike, the combined mining unions would attend. No indication, however, was given as to whether the unions themselves would apply to the Court. |