THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1925. THE COST OF STRIKES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18950, 23 February 1925, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1925. THE COST OF STRIKES.

For a country to lose through trade disputes over eight million working days in a year will seem incredible only to those who have never given serious thought to the subject. That was the experience, according to the statement just made in the House of Commons by the Minister for Labour, suffered in the United Kingdom last year. It is by no means a heavy annual total as such things go, for the figure has in recent years been occasionally more than trebled ; but it is sufficiently appalling to arouse more than regret. Occurring in a period when, even with industries running without friction, Britain was facing a ghastly unemployment problem, it added seriously to the burdens of the" nation. This additional burden was flung upon the people's bent backs by Labour: strikes, not lock-outs, built up the distressing aggregate. Those who ordered the strikes will protest that, although they called the workers out, the responsibility rests really upon the employers, whose denial of justice drove Labour to take this action. That disclaimer has long been part of Labour's stock-in-trade, and it has lost all it had of quality in the days when first it was offered to the public. Objecting to its being thrust upon them, and prepared to make that objection effective, the observant public will note that a large proportion of those workless days came through strikes organised by mere sections of workers in an industry against the advice and without the sanction of the larger federations in which they were units. So, Labour's hand, sometimes against the judgment of Labour's head, struck the body politic a blow—an instance in industrial psychology of habitual conduct passing through persistence to automatic action, beyond the inhibition of the higher brain centres. In dealing this blow, Labour injured itself. That has been ever the way with industrial strikers, but in recent years the certainty of this incidence has increased. Those 8,250,000 workless days in 1924 meant direct loss of wages, whatever employing Capital suffered. Suppose the average daily wage to be 6s Bd—no accurate data are available, and this estimate over all grades is not excessive ; there goes £2,750,000 that might have been in the idlers' pockets. But, beside that loss, there must be reckoned money actually extracted from their pockets, to finance the strike. It may very well be put down at another £1,000,000 — using figures supplied by Mr. Philip Snowden, lately Labour's Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Snowden has written some pungent things about " the cost and futility of strikes." Citing the year 1911 as one " in which the work people were exceptionally successful " in enforcing their demands, he declares that the strikes of that year cost them more than they would be able to recover at full employment in twenty-one months' time. " A strike never did bring much substantial gain to the workers" is his decision ; "in the very nature of things it is impossible that it should," Even of " strikes which appear to be successful," he lias this to say: " the apparent gains of a strike are seldom real gains." Labour, setting its heart on a weapon against oppression and getting its wish, has found itself in possession of a gun with an outrageously damaging kick. It is high time it found its way finally to a museum. Even the sympathetic strike, as Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald emphasised in a letter to the Daily News, is " poor fighting." His apt description of it is a " spectacular flare-up, the blaze and heat of which are drawn from the capital resources of trade unionism," and he adds that, although it "is always defended on the ground that it helps the men involved in the original dispute, that is exactly what it does not do and never can do." There are somo Labour leaders, convinced like Mr. Snowden and Mr. Mac Donald that strikes do not pay, who nevertheless contend tln»t strikes have their justification on their arousal of public attention to the workers' grievances. But for gome strikes, they say, Labour would \m ja-ScvfeattSS caflfi jraysooa,

after the coming of the Industrial Revolution. They agree with that general secretary of the London Dockers' Union who said of labour disputes that they killed more people in one year than the average bloodthirsty wars did in fifty, but they think that even so great a sacrifice is not extravagant if «>nly public opinion is stirred into support of Labour's cause. Nothing so much proves how effete the strike has become as that flimsy argument. Labour has rightly protested against the view that " what was, will be," and a vast change has come since the days when violent protest had to be made against inhumanities. It is very doubtful whether some of those violent outbreaks achieved all they are supposed to have done. It has become the fashion among Labour leaders to declare that every privilege the workers now enjoy has been won from the capitalist and the employer at the point of the bayonet. " Grab from below ; nothing has been or will be granted from above," has been the clearest, if least elegant, form of this incitement to strikes and other forms of sabotage. Some painstaking study of history would make that declaration appear as hollow as it really is. The fact is, however, capitalist and employer seemed to hold back, by moat and drawbridge, Labour's advance upon the c rC privilege, there was always somebody within set on aiding Labour's entry. Mrs. Browning, in her '' Cry of the Children," voiced that deep sympathy of the " haves " with t'e " have-nots," and she was inside the gate. So was Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, to whose work for the workers attention has lately again been called. Can Labour match, in the work of any of its own leaders, that unselfish striving by a man nurtured amid plenty and widely cultured 1 Even then Labour profited greatly by such advocates. They abound to-day, and only a blind, primeval love for the bludgeon prevents better use of their counsel and aid. But the bludgeon's day is practically over; as Mr. Snowden concludes, " the strike is likely to be less effective in the future even than it has been in the past."