The Waipawa Mail FRIDAY, SEPT. 11, 1925. A SCRAP OF PAPER.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XLVI, Issue 148, 11 September 1925, Page 2

The Waipawa Mail FRIDAY, SEPT. 11, 1925. A SCRAP OF PAPER.

Eleven years ago Germany paralysed the civilised world by a flagrant breach of her treaty obligations by invading Belgium in her worldconquering march. To-day the British seamen propose to violate an agreement entered into with the shipowners, and they are being encourargcd in this act of disloyalty by the seamen of Australia and New Zealand. As a result a most serious position has arisen. If the strike is successful it will simply mean industrial chaos, and agreements will not be worth the paper they are written on. Of all the privileges secured Intrude unionism for the workers do - ing the nineteenth century, the most highly prized was the right to “collective bargaining. ’ ’ When once it was an established and accepted principle that the individual worker, desiring the redress of a grievance and a rise in wages, need not go personally, cap in hand, to his employer, to be overawed and brow-beaten into submission, but that he might cooperate with his fellow workers, and they might present their ease collectively through chosen delegates and officials with the combined weight of tlie whole organisation behind them—when once this point was reached in our industrial history, the workers had secured for themselves a weapon of immense value and potency. No man familiar with the progress of the Labor movement during the past fifty years can doubt that “collective bargaining ” has done more for the workers than any other right or privilege they have gained. But a-bargain implies an agreement to which there are two sides and unless both parties concerned are prepared to keep their promises and carry their pledges into effect, the whole system breaks down and capitalists and wage-earners alike are thrown hack upon the primitive and chaotic method of individual adjustment varied by intermittent outbursts of industrial war. One of the most remarkable features of the situation created liv this strike in Australia and New Zealand is that the initiative does not appear to have come from Britain or from the unions directly concerned. The British seamen through their chosen representatives, as we have said, tacitly accepted the terms offered by the shipowners, and made no concerted attempt to repudiate them. It has been

largely reserved for Messrs Walsh and | Johansen in Australia, and for their I admirers in New Zealand, to discover that the agreement is unsatisfactory and the terms unfair. What Mr Johansen feels about the matter may be gathered from the following choice specimen of his eloquence: “Ilieworkers are always in the right when they fight against the capitalist class. All means are good means. IV e should make it our policy whenever we see a strike of sailors in any port in the world, to say that it is our fight.” The merits of the dispute are, of course, a matter of sublime indifference to Mr Johansen. As for Mr Walsh, he has recently assured his followers that he is entirely regardless of the consequences of his actions. “I have not got a single penny invested in British shipping,” he said, “so that I do not care what happens to British shipping.” Probably not, but if British shipping is driven from the seas by the unfair conditions imposed by Walsh and Johansen am their like, what will become of Britisl seamen ?