WATERSIDE WORKERS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 78, 24 June 1943, Page 4

WATERSIDE WORKERS

BETTER RESULTS THAN EVER BEFORE ORGANISATION AND COOPERATION (From Our Parliamentary Reporter) Wellington, This Day. Figures would prove that 25 per cent, better work was being done on the waterfront to-day than at any previous time, said the Minister of Labour, Mr P. C Webb, in the House of Representatives last night, when he spoke of the "difficult job” the Government had had on the waterfront. “The waterfront has been the bugbear of industry for many years,” he said. ‘We have had men there who. I’m sorry to say, used to leave their job there and go down town and have a few spots, come back and tell the boss to go to some impossible place and there was no organisation at all.” It had been a very ticklish job to change that, continued the Minister, » and it had needed co-operation and ; goodwill. He had told the executive j of the Waterside Workers’ Federation that such a state of affairs could not continue He had always believed that by working in co-operation better results could be obtained. The men of the waterfront were just as good as, and many of them were better than, some of those who criticised them. There had been a time, he admitted, when the "tail end” of society used to go to the waterfront and join the union, but that was not so now. If a man were not of good and decent character on the waterfront and if he let the boose interfere with his job, he was thrown out of the union. About <0 men had been got rid of. Discipline imposed on the working class by itself was better than any coming from the Government. Men °n the waterfront to-day, said the Minister, were working 60 to 80 hours a week on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays and in the rain, though not as many work in the rain as ought to. On some days those men were doing a long, hard job. Mr W. J, Poison (Nat., Stratford): But on the gang system half are standing by. The Minister said that that was a myth. It happened only in extreme cases where men were nearly frozen, through working in freezing chambers. The Minister taid that the majority of waterside workers in Wellington were over 60 years old. and there were ° Ver 80 who should have retired, but the country wanted every man With energy. In nearly all the small ports, unions appointed their own b °X e L and did the work themselves, with the result that they were turning boats around very much more quickly than they used to. In Grey harbour they had put on 35 per cent, more timber than formerly and 37 per cent i more coal.