Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, MONDAY DEC. 6, 1926 COUNTING THE COST

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16209, 6 December 1926, Page 6

Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, MONDAY DEC. 6, 1926 COUNTING THE COST

Tho recent strike.of butchers at the freezing works in New Zenland was short-lived, and, because of the prompt measures taken to ensure that this most important industry should not be paralysed, its effect upon production was not; very extensive or serious. The principal loss, as it ever will bo, has been to the men who were persuaded by tho clap-trap of their loaders to refuse employment when it was offered them. They deprived themselves, at a time when they could least afford it, of the opportunity of earning good money with which to give their families a little comfort at the Christmas season, and their gain has been—what? A return to work on tho old conditions with the guarantee of a review of their wages and working conditions by tho Arbitration Court a few months earlier than such review would otherwise have taken place. With the pastoral industry in its present condition there can be but a very shadowy hope of enhanced remuneration for their work. The plain fact is that the men have gained nothing and they have lost a good deal in a moral sense, if not actually in a monetary one, by a very ill-advised strike. They are learning only what their contemporaries in Knglnnd have learned by sad experience in the last few years. The latest Conference of tho Labor Party, hold at Margate a few weeks" ago, was very enlightening (<): this point. Its leading speakers— Mr. Williams, Mr. Ramsay MaeDonald, Mr. .1. 11. Thomas—were very critical of the policy of aggression in industrial disputes. "The time will come," declared Mr. Thomas, "when some of us who have.had to stand the slurs and jeers will speak out." Speaking of the miners' request for a levy upon the other trade unions in support of tho strike, lie oxpained with embarrassing frankness why his own union, the railwaymen's, was unablo to do anything in that way. Sin CO the general strike demanded and obtained by the Miners' Federation from tho General Council of the Trades Union Congress, thero were, said Mr. Thomas, 45,000 railwaymen

who had never re-entered upon the employment, which they then abandoned; and there were in addition 200,000 railwaymen working but three days a week. How can a levy in support of others bo imposed upon a union with all these victims of a mad decision to provide for? The engineers, said Mr. Thomas, were now making a levy for their own unemployed. These men are workless mainly on account of the coal stoppage;'and tho same iSttrutj of the-lfi per (Sent, of tlie boilermakcrs who, Mr. Thomas declares, are unemployed today. Mr. Tilletf followed with the statement that his own union, the Transport Workers, had already spent a million "in the miners' interests" —that is, presumably, in paymentsout necessitated by the general strike and its devastating consequences. His union, said' Mr. Tillctt, was half-a-million in debt; it had spent tho whole of its funds, arid there wcro still 80,000 men out of work and 100,000 not in full work. The wreckage wrought by the strike in trade union affairs generally, the Daily Telegraph remarks, is but one aspect of the dfimago inflicted 'on the nation. To the current issue of The "Ranker" an nrtiajo on "Tho Cost of Industrial Friction" is contributed by Mr. William Graham, M.P. Mr Graham is the Chairman of tho Public Accounts Committee of tho House of Commons; but additional point is lent to his views by the fact that he was Financial Secretary to tho Treasury in the Labor Government. He reminds us that, apart, front the loss of wages in tho mining and other industries, affecting.perhaps six million persons, thero is the 'ruinous loss of profits, the source from which the necessary additions to capital are_ normally drawn, from which industrial debt is paid off, and to which the Government looks for the maintenance of the national revenue. The balance of this year's Budget is already more than imperilled, and any considerable further reduction'of the national debt seems out of the question'. And all this at a time when Germany, thanks to the period of inflation, has largely got rid of industrial debt, and when hi "tho United Stntes "enormous progress is being made in .standardisation, simplification, arid almost every form of industrial evolution." Can Britain, "with the war-burdens of half the world round its neck," afford to lose a single pound? Dealing generally witn the labor disputes

of the present year, Mr. Graham shows that in the first seven months of it more than 83,000,000 working days were lost, which, is nearly as much as the total for the whole twelve months of 1921, the worst previous year. Taking a wider survey Mr. Graham gives official statistics to show that in the seven years since the war ihc average- loss of workingdays per year has been three times greater than the average annual loss over a period of twenty-one years before the war. This ruinous tribute of industrial inactivity has been laid upon the nation while it has had to 'find more than four times the national revenue raised beforo the war, and while it is loaded with a debt increased from £650,000,000 to-£7,760,000,000. These figures of loss, adds the Telegraph, leave out of account the pre sent year, which will certainly show the worst record of industrial stagnation ever known. With these considerations in mind, it is a matter for great, thankfulness that the coal strike has collapsed. After seven months of stark lunacy the miners are seeking reemployment, but it must be almost as many, years before, the, whole of the cost to. British industry is counted and made good.' ,