STRIKES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 34, 10 February 1930, Page 9

STRIKES

SOUTHERN TEXTILE WORKERS PATRONAGE AND POVERTY. Patronage, exploitation and suspicion, similar to that existing in the days of slavery, were blamed for recent labour disturbances in the textile districts of the South by speakers at the thiricth anniversary luncheon of the National Consumers League in the Hotel Astor. Mill workers from the area describe! the recent strikes and riots. Discussing the industrial transition in the South, Dr Broadus Mitchell, Associate Professor of Political Economy in Johns Hopkins University, pleaded for a distinction between the shootings, riots and strikes and the fundamental labour problems which caused them. The strikes were made, he held, not for shorter hours and higher wages so much as for “the inherent right to organise” labour. Suspicion and misunderstanding of modern industrial methods and the difficulties of social adjustment, he said, account for the unsettled conditions in the textile sections to-day. He thought that the unionisation of the workers to improve conditions of labour and better welfare work would eventually solve the difficulties in the South. Dr Lois MacDonald, economics professor in Now York University and head of the Southern Summer School for industrial women workers at Burnsville. N.C., compared the happenings in the South to the industrial revolution in England a century ago. “Industrial technique has outrur social technique,” she said. “The South does not know how to deal with the social effects of machine production Add to this the heritage of *pa tronagrand poverty’ which comes down from the days of slavery; and the psychology of a defeated people who continue to burn at the memory of reconstruction and carpet bag rule. Carpet-bagger!' camo down to teach a backward people; labour agitators coming down are the modern version. Often the Southerner does not see any difference.” Mrs Florence Kelley, secretary of the ' Consumers League, asserted that England had the same experience in dealing with its textile workers “but did not murder or tolerate murder.” She dp manded that industry be made to pa< its “social costs.” Strike conditions in the South were described by Margaret Bowen, secre-tary-treasurer of Local 1,630 of the United Textile Workers Union in Elizabethton, Tcnrt., and Mrs Cora Hall, of Marion, N. C., both of whom were themselves strikers. Dr John Howland Lathrop, pastor of the Unitarian Church of the Saviour, Brooklyn, presided.

The league adopted resolutions calling for support of shorter working days and weeks; amendments to compensation laws prescribing compensation based on earning power at the age of 21 for permanent injuries to minors; minimum-wage laws for minors; old-age pensions, and other industrial reforms.