AN INDUSTRIAL TRUCE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19952, 20 November 1926, Page 12

AN INDUSTRIAL TRUCE.

It is interesting, if it be true, as most probably it is, that prominent members of the Labour Party at Home are organising a campaign in favour of a three years’ industrial peace. Needless to say, a proposal of that character will be wholly acceptable to the employers of labour. It is not by them that industrial disturbances are desired. Their interest lies altogether in the other direction. And so, if they were frank enough to admit it, does the interest of the wage-earners. It is only on the rarest of occasions that any benefit accrues to them as the result of a strike. When it does it is, as a rule, very dearly bought. . Of the ruinous consequences of a strike the most striking illustration is that afforded by the coal dispute at Home which is now as good as over although it has not been officially terminated. The estimate that this dispute, which, of course, has been exceptionally protracted, has cost the Mother Country £400,000,000 may he accepted as tolerably accurate. It is only by foreign countries that any advantage has been derived from the stoppage of the British mining industry. To a country, which has now to begin the uphill task of recovering the losses that have been inflicted on it by the ghastly blunder of the coal dispute, the suggestion of an industrial peace should appeal with irresistible force. Here m New Zealand a similar suggestion by the president of the Employers’ Federation has been met only with scorn by the Labour press and by workers’ organisations. One of these organisations, the Alliance of Labour, is busily engaged at the present time in the effort to establish One Big Union. As thoughtful working men realise, the object which the advocates of One Big Union have in vieiy, however much they may. scirk to disguise it, is the prosecution of industrial strife. The spirit that

animates the Alliance of Labour is being exhibited, moreover, in the attempt that is now being made to dissuade the freezing works’ butchers in the North from offering their services at the award rates of pay. If the wage-earners allow an organisation of this description to dictate to them they will be driven to decisions at complete variance with that which has been formed by the most responsible figures in the British Labour Party and is leading them to seek an industrial truce.