A Steward’s Lot.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVII, Issue XII, 21 September 1901, Page 537

A Steward’s Lot.

While I have sympathy with the principle of unionism, its incarnated manifestations here are not altogether beautiful. Vested with their new powers, thie unions are apt to be impatient of minor grievances and quick in quarrel. Seldom, indeed, does Jt happen nowadays that these grievances have attracted the attention of the world before the unions have ventilated them. Long before they have assumed the seriousness of crying evils they are before the Boards of Conciliation. I had not conceived there was such a thing as a long-suffering union till I read the other day that the stewards and cooks had filed an application for the hearing of their grievances in the matter of hours of labour, wages, etc. Then I recognised that the body who could have so long delayed to complain of the undoubtedly' hard and tedious labour its members go through deserved the epithet most entirely'. One marvels that ships’ stewards have not rebelled long ago against their lot, which is perhaps the most unenviable among workers. Still beginning, never ending, the tedious routine goes on day in, day out. If passengers are not eating—the chief recreation on shipboard—they are ill. It is the steward’s duty to wait on them-assiduously in both cases, and in both they are apt to be particularly exacting. The holidaymaker, with a sea-sharpened appetite, is a selfish animal; the seasick passenger has no bowels of mercy save for himself. The poor steward is between the upper and the nether millstones of the hale and the sick. However, he has struck at last, and it will be a marvel if the Conciliation Board does not extend to him a full measure of their sympathy. One sincerely hopes that their attitude may not beget in him that Oliver Twist like spirit it has done in other unions, whom success has made arrogant. for where should we be without his kindly ministry? The tedium of a sea voyage and the horrors of sea-siekness, which at table or by the bunk-side the steward does so much to alleviate, would be unbearable were he to labour only by the hard and fast laws prescribed by a union.