COTTON INDUSTRY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19067, 12 January 1924, Page 12

COTTON INDUSTRY.

SPECTRE OF UNIONISM. RECORD PLANTING. JPbom Oob Ow Coehespondent.) SYDNEY, January 3. Just at the moment when hopes for success of the cotton growing industry in Australia are at their highest pitch, the distribution of seed- for the coming planting in Queensland having provided for an aggregate area of 106,471 acres, the spectre of unionism with its demands for abnormal wage increases and conditions raises its head. “The cotton industry,” declared Sir Hugh Denison, Chairman of the British Australasian Cotton Association Ltd., at the annual meeting of the Association in Brisbane, “has been served by the Australian Workers’ Union, and this company has been cited for a new award fer the industry. All I can say is that if that union "is able to obtain anything like the claims they are making in the award it will definitely kill the cotton industry for ever in Australia. The claims set down therein may be applicable to highly protectee! industries, sufch as the sugar industry, which is able to pay extremely high wages, but for an industry such as the cotton, struggling as it is against bad seasons, having to fight in the markets of the world against cotton grown in countries where "cheap labour is to be obtained and where conditions in some cases are very' much more favourable than those previously stated, we have no hope of securing protection for this industry ; therefore it behoves us, and you gentlemen also, to use every effort by publicity and otherwise to point out to the people in Queensland the necessity to leave this industry free for a year or two from anything of this nature*. Claims of this nature cannot be sustained for one single moment if industries of this kind are to be established throughout Australia.