GRADUAL IMPROVEMENT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26904, 16 October 1948, Page 7

GRADUAL IMPROVEMENT

FRENCH STRIKERS RETURNING TO WORK

TENSION IN NORTH BREAKING Rec. 10 p.m. LONDON, Oct. 15. The slow improvement in the French social situation continues, says the Paris correspondent of The Times. The steel workers in Lorraine are due to return to work to-day, the railway strike is petering out, and Paris taxi drivers returned to work yesterday afternoon after an eight-day strike. Only in the northern coalfields does the picture remain substantially unchanged, although even here reports speak of a tendency at some pits to return to work. The Government, meanwhile, has apprised the National Price Committee of its decision to increase coal prices bv 18J per cent. This means a revision of industrial prices. The Government has undertaken to limit as far as possible the effect on prices, but undoubtedly there will be a fairly general increase.

Reuter’s Paris correspondent says the French Miners’ Federation issued a statement calling on the miners to persevere in the strike and “ welcoming the declarations of solidarity made by the general secretary of the Miners’ Union in Belgium, Mr Rosier, and by the general secretary of the Mine Workers’ Union in Britain, Mr Arthur Horner.” Mr Rosier told the federation that his union had guaranteed the French miners moral and material support, that subscription lists were being circulated in Belgian mines, and that if necessary an appeal would be made to the whole of the Belgian public. A Moscow message says: A Pravda commentator ridicules the suggestion of the French Minister of Internal Affairs. M. Jules Moch, that Moscow directed the French strikes. He accused M. Moch of “ dishonourable provocation and slander ” for saying he possessed a letter written by the late Andrei Zhdanov to the French Communists.