IS IT MINORITY RULE?

Southland Times, Issue 19456, 21 January 1925, Page 4

IS IT MINORITY RULE?

In view of the suspicion that a foreign element is manipulating the Australian Seamen’s Union to serve its own nefarious ends, an incidental question raised is why any body of workers should lend themselves to a merely destructive policy from which they evidently have as little to gain as other sections of the community. In the Melbourne Age it was pointed out recently that so far as the seamen are concerned this anomalous state of affairs is explained by the constitution of their union and the exceptional conditions attaching to its membership. As this authority describes the position, the Australian Seamen’s Union has some 8000 members, but owing to the migratory nature of the seaman’s calling, its membership is constantly fluctuating, and only a small proportion of its members take any active part in its affairs. Little more than a quarter of the members voted in the last election of a union president. The quorum at either general or special meetings is 50 financial members. Provision is made in the rules for taking a plebiscite of members on important questions, but, according to the Age writer, this provision has degenerated into a mere fiction. It is equally important that extraordinary powers are vested in the union executive. This body is empowered to “determine questions on which the rules are silent or doubtful, or on which any agreement or award is silent or doubtful,” and also “to make and enforce such new rules as they may deem advisable for the union’s interests or control.” Although they may be accounted for in part by the conditions inseparable from maritime employment, the constitution and working practice of the union obviously lend themselves in an exceptional degree to the assumption of autocratic control. This, it is manifest, is what has happened in Australia.