COAL STRIKE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 84, Issue 85, 12 April 1940, Page 6

COAL STRIKE

AUSTRALIAN DEADLOCK BOTH SIDES FIRM EFFECT ON WAR EFFORTS. REDUCED STEEL OUTPUT. SYDNEY, April 3. The practically nation-wide strike of coal miners, to obtain redress of alleged grievances arising from their last Arbitration Court award, roi. been in progress three ■ • beginning to have severe effects on the community, as a result of the refusal of owners and men to confer. The strike is retarding the national war effort. Perhaps tho most serious effect so far has been the curtailment, of sloe 1 production, which is essential to normal Australian development of its munitions and other wartime programmes. Five thousand men have already heen dismissed from branches of the B.H.P. works at Newcastle and 3000 from the Australian Iron and Steel mills at Port. Kembla. Many : subsidiary industries at. those centres have also been affected. The num her of coal miners on strike is 23,000. Forty-eight vessels are laid up on the Australian coast, involving the sign-ing-off of 1900 seamen. Train Services Curtailed. Victorian railway services have been drastically curtailed for more than a week. The New South Wales services will be reduced from Sunday. Longdistance mail, goods, and other trains will not run, and all lines in the more thickly-populated areas with steam trains will be on a reduced basis. This will mean temporary unemployment, for thousands of railwaymen. Sydney and Newcastle tramways services will be cut 50 per cent, as i from Monday, except, in peak hours. Some so-called “sectional” services will be eliminated. Omnibuses, as far as possible, will be used on tramway routes to dispense with trams. The ships mostly affected are mainly carriers of coal and iron, but' some of those out of commission transport general cargo. Among them are those in the potato trade between Tasmania and Sydney, and an acute shortage of potatoes is expected. Refusal to Intervene. The Federal Government has resolutely refused to intervene in the coalmining dispute, declaring that the Arbitration Court is the body to which the miners should refer their claims. With one of the Judges on military duty and another unavailable because he was the owners’ counsel before appointment to the Court, only the Chief Judge. Sir George Beeby, is available to hear the claims, and the miners object to his hearing them. The Government, nevertheless, declares that the Court is properiy constituted, and has persistently told the men to approach the Court, only to meet with the men’s equally persistent refusal to do so. It is apparently the Government's plan to make the strike a trial of strength between constituted authority and the industrial strike weapon, especially in view of growing Communist influence in the Miners’ Federation, and, pdssibly, with an eye on strengthening its case in the anti-Red

issue that seems likely to influence the elections due iater this year. In the meantime, the public suffers because of the Government's failure to cope with what one of the Ministers, Sir Frederick Stew-art, has called an "impossible situation.” The State Government is anxiously, but powerlessly, awaiting a settlement, if only because the strike is costing it £20,000 a week and threatens all its efforts to live within its budgetary framework.