UNIONISM RUN MAD.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21254, 7 February 1931, Page 16

UNIONISM RUN MAD.

HOSTILITY TO WAGE REDUCTIONS. UNEMPLOYMENT IN PREFERENCE. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, January 29. No one, not even the great majority of employers, objects to unionism on sane, sound lines, as an accepted principle of Australian industrial life. But when it openly, and with its eyes open, courts disaster, and throws hundreds of wellpaid men out of work, at a juncture when other jobs cannot be found, and thousands of unfortunates are practically starving, one begins seriously to wonder whether it is quite sane. The Sydney newspapers associated with what is known as the merger group put it to their army of employees recently that the alternative to the closing dovln of one of the papers, and, as a natural corollary, the discharge of several hundred men, was a 15 per cent, allround reduction in wages. By ballot, the big majority of the union employees rejected the wage cut; in other words, they prefer to join the army of unemployed. They prefer no bread at all to half a loaf. And this at a time when about one person out of every eight employable people in Australia is out of work, with not the remotest chance of finding it. Reduced wages these days appears an infinitely better proposition than the loss of a job. Not once, in this fair continent’s story, has Labour put its head in the oven and turned the gas on. Perhaps it will wake up some day._ The irony- of this particular situation is that the union is levying those still in work 10 per cent, for the upkeep of those who are deliberately tossing themselves into the unemployed maelstrom. With the sacrifice of another 5 per cent, none of them would have been out of jobs. The mental processes of unionism these days are difficult to fathom.