SITTING DOWN

North Canterbury Gazette, Volume 6, Issue 66, 9 April 1937, Page 4

SITTING DOWN

Now that the grave-diggers have staged a "sit-down" strike, America may recover its sense of humour. But the sitters will not recover the millions of dollars they have lost in wages.. Except in the schools, where it was probably something gained to throw out examinations, the epidemic has achieved nothing that common sense would not have brought more rapidly. One employer in fact reduced sitting down to an absurdity by the simple device of sitting down himself. His men having taken possession of his factory—a car seat-cover plant—he made himself comfortable in his office and refused to step out to get another order until the siege was lifted in the work-shop. There was the case also of the students of Michigan (or perhaps Wisconsin) who not merely sat but lay down in the college lecture rooms until a suspended teacher was. restored. But direct action of this kind is not even original. There are several examples in the Bible —starting with Jacob —while the recent history of India is almost as full of them as the early history of England’s suffragettes. In any

case every farmer who has owned Merinos knows that an old ewe, if the mood takes her, will beat any factory-hand at sinking down and refusing to budge. Then consider the tuatara. If we don’t want to work there is not much difficulty in finding a precedent —animal or human —for “loafing “and inviting our souls.” But it is to be hoped that no one will quote the North Arlington precedent in Rangiora until a vault has been built in Oxford Road.