TROOPS ASSIST IN UNLOADING COAL AT FRENCH PORTS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26918, 2 November 1948, Page 5

TROOPS ASSIST IN UNLOADING COAL AT FRENCH PORTS

Rec. 9 p.m. PARIS, Nov. 1. Troops assisted non-Communist dockers to unload coal ships at Dieppe, Cherbourg, Rouen, La Pillice, and Le Havre, and other troops are on the way for the ske job at Bordeaux, Nantes, St. Nazaire, Dunkirk, and Boulogne. Twenty-eight of the 34 coal ships in French ports during the weekend were held up by the dockers, refusal to handle imported coal.. An explosive device placed'near the home at Douai of a mechanic who was requisitioned for work in the mines injured the mechanic’s wife. Strikers pillaged the houses of other requisitioned workers. Two demonstrations organised by the strikers marched on the mines, but the police and troops turned them back without violence. The French Ministry of Industry has suspended the secretary-general of the Communnist-led Miners’ Federation, Victorin Duguet; the secretary of the federation, Celestin Bias; and the sec-retary-general of the Railwaymen’s Federation, Raymond Tournemaine, from their posts on the French Natiorial Coal Board. The Ministry accused the two miners’ officials of having appealed to miners to discontinue the safety services in mines. M. Tournemaine had already been suspended from the directorship of the French railways because of his appeal to railwaymen to stop trains carrying imported coal. M. Marcel Combe, Mayor of Firminy, the strike trouble centre, near St. Etienne, in the Loire coalfield, has been removed from his post by order of the Ministry of the Inferior, which stated that M. Combe had had a poster printed and displayed “ containing defamatory imputations against the Government.” Hopes that new price cuts in meat, fish, clothing, wine, and other items would end the strike decreased to-day when the secretary-general of the Non-Communist Confederation of Labour, M. Leon Jouhaux, said the reductions still left too great a difference between wages and prices. Butter is almost non-existent for French housewives, except in the black market. It will be rationed at about 10£oz a month from to-morrow.