THE FREEZING INDUSTRY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19957, 26 November 1926, Page 8

THE FREEZING INDUSTRY.

It may bo surmised that the trouble in tin; freezing industry, caused by the engineered demand of employees in certain districts in the north for increased wages :uul the refusal to supply necessary labour in the meantime, will last just as long as the Alliance of Labour can preserve any measure of control of the situation. All the evidence points to this attempt to hold up an important industry as particularly unwarranted, and indicates (hat the primary producers are thoroughly justified in thcii strictures conceiyiirg the tactics

of the malcontents and in their determination to ensure by their own efforts, where it may be necessary, that the industry shall be carried on. The endeavour to establish a hold-up is being made in the face of the fact that the workers in the freezing industry receive remuneration in the terms of an award which has still some time to run. It is only the more unreasonable in view of the circumstance that the farmers and most of the freezing companies are not, as is sufficiently well known, in any position to stand the additional strain which the demands put forward would impose upon them. “With the steadily dropping value of our primary products,” Mr Jessup, chairman of the Wairoa Farmers’ Freezing Company, has said, “the cost must be reduced if production is to be maintained.” It is represented on good authority that many farmers who are employing labour are making less than the wages paid by them to their own employees. It is almost amusing to read in a message from the north that many farmers who have been “scratching for a living” of late arc welcoming an opportunity of entering the freezing works in the present emergency, and “earning big money” such as they allege the freezing hands have been receiving. A feature about this emergence of an untimely dispute in the freezing industry, which seems to illustrate pointedly the mischievous responsibility assumed by certain union officials, consists in the circumstance that, so far as has been disclosed, there has been little indication of dissatisfaction with the existing conditions from the rank and file of the workers concerned. The Feilding branch of the Freezing Workers’ Union has passed a resolution characterising as inopportune the demand by the Hawke’s Bay Union for increased wages, and recommending that “the strike be called off.” Judged by the evidence available, that opinion expresses the view of the great majority of the workers in the industry. The sooner the unions give the Alliance of Labour to understand that this is so, and that its services in the fomentation of trouble are not required, the better it will be for everybody.