INDUSTRIAL WORLD

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23001, 2 October 1936, Page 3

INDUSTRIAL WORLD

NEWS AND NOTES

By J. T. Paul

The public that sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberty, never will have any.— Garrison. EMPLOYERS’ OBLIGATION because he had not been fully taught in the terms of his apprenticeship contract, a bootmaker was awarded £lO damages and costs in the Christchurch Magistrate’s Court. The action was brought for £IOO, the plaintiff alleging that lack of complete instruction had prevented him from gaining employment as a journeyman; but in a reserved judgment the magistrate held that there were other factors which might have more weight in preventing him gaining employment, and awarded damages only because the terms of the contract had not been carried out.

The plaintiff’s case was that he had been dismissed on July 1, 1935, and at that time he had not been fully instructed as a competent journeyman. That was the reason, he held, why he had not been able to gain employment. In his judgment the magistrate held that while the plaintiff had been instructed in the necessary machine work, he had not been taught “ making right through by* hand,” as the contract specified. The defendant’s contention that those words were obsolete, and should be limited to work not done by machines, could not be upheld, as plain words in a written contract could not be nullified by parol evidence. The real reason why the plaintiff had not been able to get work was, in the magistrate’s opinion, because there was still a surplus of journeymen in the bootmaking industry, therefore he was only entitled,to nominal damages. NEW ZEALAND VISITOR IN AUSTRALIA The latest Australian Worker to hand has the following from its Victorian correspondent:— In acknowledging a welcome by President E. A. Pearce at a recent meeting of the Trades Hall Council, Mr G. T. Thurston, district secretary of the Alliance of Labour, Canterbury, New Zealand, who was on his return home from Geneva, after having represented New Zealand workers at the recent International Conference, said that the two outstanding questions discussed were the 40-hour working week and payment for holidays. On his way home on the Orford he noticed that a number of Southern Europeans were travelling to Western Australia to work in the mines and to Queensland for the sugar plantations. He had been informed that immigration agents in Australia were receiving £5 a head for every Southern European arriving in Australia. There seemed to be good grounds for inquiring into the matter. Mr Thurston said that since Labour came into office in New Zealand it was proceeding as quickly as possible, to give effect to its policy. Minister for Public Works Robert Semple had increased the number of men employed on Government works by 3000. He had signed an agreement for the 40hour working week at 2s an hour. He hoped Australian workers would continue to fight until the 40-hour week was established.

Mr Thurston was convinced that, provided Labour received sufficient support in New Zealand, it would not be long before it established the 30hour working week. The resources of New Zealand were ample for the purpose required. The policy of Labour must be to raise the living standards of the workers as high as possible. Mr Thurston said that, as a result of his visit to Geneva, he was convinced, that the representatives of the British Governments, outside of New Zealand, were the most reactionary in the world. Practically every representative of the Governments of other countries were prepared to support the progressive measures, with the exception of the British Empire Governments. They had been responsible for the failure to secure the statutory majority for the 40-hour week convention to be applied universally, Mr Thurston felt that if Labour would close up its ranks, as had been done in New Zealand, better results would be obtained for the workers Therp should be one Labour Movement only for Australia and one Government. FRENCH AND GERMAN WORKERS German workers are following with tremendous interest the advance of the French working classes during recent weeks, says a Labour exchange. The success of the stay-in strikes and the concessions obtained by the French workers are commented upon in the German factories and eagerly discussed between Nazi and anti-Nazi workers. At a big factory at Dusseldorf a large portrait of Leon Blum, the Socialist Premier of France, was posted in a workshop and nobody took it down for many hours. Miners of the Ruhr collieries sent a delegation to the Nazi Workers’ Front headquarters and to-the managers as well, pointing out the improvement in salaries and working conditions obtained by French workers and their own comparatively bad position. The repercussions of the French strikes are particularly strong in the Saar industries, where many thousands of workers cross the French frontier every day and report to their fellowworkers on the changes in France. As a result of this movement a new. wave of arrests among industrial workers is reported from Western Germany, especially in the Saar. THREE OF A KIND Since the Russian Revolution, which established Bolshevism as the combined political system and State religion in Russia, there have, notes the Manchester Guardian, been two other upheavals that have produced kindred establishments—the Fascist Revolution in Italy and the National Socialist Revolution in Germany. The kinship between these two is sometimes, though not always, admitted by the followers of both, and they are often classed together as simply ,*' Fascism.” The kinship between them and Bolshevism is vehemently denied by the followers of ail three, but it is nevertheless fundamental. Doctrinally they are different in many ways, though similar in some. In practice their fundamental resemblance emerges, and all three turn out to be party dictatorships which, having invested their own authority with absolute and unchallengeable political, moral and religious sanction, have enormous and unprecedented arbitrary and tyrannical power. All three are fundamentally and implacably hostile to that individual freedom without which Western civilisation, as we understand it, is inconceivable. SYNDICALISM IN BOLIVIA The newspaper El Mercuric published an interview at La Paz with Colonel David Toro, president of the military junta in Bolivia, in which he said the new Government sought to create a Socialist State in Bolivia entirely different from past administrations. The aim is at syndicalisation of all national activities and establishment of a parliamentary body that shall be “purely functional,” with no contacts with politics. Colonel Toro said relations with Chile would be placed on a broader economic footing, with mutual concessions in trade. Customs and transportation. He declared the working classes would have more influence than at present. The compulsory labour measures recently decreed, he continued, will soon give the tin mining industry the necessary workers, and new arrangements with • the London tin “ pool ” soon will be closed, thus improving the export figures. Vast colonisation schemes, with further imnligration. are being considered