FEDERATION IN TROUBLE

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 8181, 24 July 1912, Page 4

FEDERATION IN TROUBLE

WORKERS GETTING WISE,

The Waterside Workers’ Federation is in session at Wanganui. A year ago the majority of tho members of the organisation wished to give support to the Unity campaign—now the United Labor Party. But when the Federation of Labor was unable to bring the body into affiliation with that organisation the friends of the federation tried to disrupt the waterside workers.

The watersiders of Auckland, Wellington, Lyttelton, 'Dunedin, and Greymouth did withdraw from their own federation and join the unions. But some of the old unions stood loyally by their own and in behalf of the

Unity movement. The Groymouth •vatersiders have again withdrawn from tho miners. There is a strong movement on foot in Wellington, Auckland and other points to do the same. While the federation has been thus divided no effort has been made to make a bad matter worse by trying to involve any of the unions in controversy regarding tho United Labor Party.

The way seems clear now to recreate the old federation and to bring all bands into the United Labor Party just as the overwhelming majority of tho delegates wished to do more than a year ago.

Further breaking away from tho ‘‘war on political action,” “war on arbitration,” and “strike first and confer afterwards ’* policy is becoming general among those unions which have been induced to take up these war-cries is shown in the resentment to all these policies now developing among tho tramwaymon in Auckland, the miners in the Thames district, and the calling of a conference of the executive of the federation not to paralyse the industry of New Zealand but to find some way to relieve the locomotor-ataxia from which it is already suffering.