OBSOLETE STRIKE WEAPON

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23595, 3 September 1938, Page 18

OBSOLETE STRIKE WEAPON

" To-day the strike weapon is out of date," said Mr Joseph Jones in his presidential address to the British Mine Workers' Federation, only qualifying his statement with the words "unless faced with intractable opposition." There was no uproar, notes the Spectator; no more than a mild expression of dissent from another member in a later speech—and this at a representative meeting of the great trade union which has been regarded as the most bellicose in Britain and has been involved in the most prolonged and disastrous strikes in this century. Mr Jones is justified by the history of the trade union movement since the collapse of the coal strike in 1926. Both trade union leaders and representative employers have learnt that there is nothing to be gained by carrying a dispute to the point at which a strike can no longer be avoided. True, there is always the right to strike in reserve. It cannot be ignored. But it is a weapon which need never be used unless one side or the other has 'gone out of its senses. It is a weapon as out of date in civilised industry as war would be in a civilised Europe. British industry seems to be reacts ing that point of civilisation when authorised strikes in big trades are at least rare.