THEY ALSO SERVE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25309, 20 August 1943, Page 4

THEY ALSO SERVE

Asked recently by the magistrate during a Police Court hearing in Auckland what he had been doing standing near a shed on the wharf, a witness replied: “I was not doing anything, sir. I was standing there doing nothing. That is my job.” This man was what is termed, possibly a trifle euphemistically, a waterside worker. It was explained in further evidence that he was employed as a “ spare man,” and so was, at least under a proper interpretation of the award governing the industry in which he is engaged, earning his wages in a thoroughly legitimate manner. Yet the public may take leave to doubt the justice, and indeed the reason, of some of the provisions which now fence about the sacred calling of the wharf worker, and those in kindred branches of employment. It is not that anyone would begrudge them the high wages for long hours of work that at the busy ports of war-time New Zealand they now customarily enjoy. The real complaint is that they are often paid actually for doing little more than the naive witness at Auckland acknowledged, and that they are not prepared, while taking excessively, to give anything. The instance in Auckland the other day where waterside workers returned to the ship’s hold a sling of cargo loaded in error with one sack of cocoa beans more than they—but not their award —considered a fair load, is unfortunately not unique. Cases such as that of the harbour board launchman, \vho claims more than £8 for staying at home on a Sunday, shake the faith of the public in the operation of union awards; and may well shake the faith of less fortunate and harder-working unionists in other industries in the Government which tolerates such inequalities as between workers. It would be too chivalrous to overlook the fact that the Waterside Workers’ Union is one of the most powerful numerically, and so one of the most potent politically in New Zealand. This fact it is, and not any particular industrial skill on the part of its members, which enables them to-day to be recompensed disproportionately through emergency conditions. Their elevation to the ranks of what used to be called profiteers is the effect of an award framed for other circumstances and a Government which has confided its soul not to the keeping of the people of the Dominion, but of the big industrial unions.