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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 2
[Australian Typographical Association assists strikers]
The Australian Typographical Association has again been assisting strikers in other trades with the compositors' money. The Newcastle miners' strike, which has just collapsed, after paralysing half the industries of New South Wales, has been the recipient of the grant—a mere drop in the ocean of wasted funds; and now the Australian ironmoulders, who are out on strike, and who refuse to sign the rules of the Board of Conciliation, are drawing substantial support from the printers' little hoard. An amendment in the constitution prohibiting such misplaced generosity, is urgently needed. There are several good reasons against the practice. The members of one trade have no means of knowing the nature of the issues involved in the squabbles of other trades. What, for instance, can a tinsmith or bootmaker understand of the little technical points concerning fat, standing matter, or corrections, on which composing-room disputes arise? Moreover, the rule does not work both ways—no other trade supports the compositors, by money grant or otherwise. It is notorious that trade unions habitually take their printing to rat offices and cock-robin shops. Utterly indifferent to quality, or to the principles involved, they prefer the work of P.D.'s and turnovers to that of journeymen, because it is cheaper. In a New Zealand constituency not long ago, the « labor candidate » was a newspaper proprietor who was noted for cutting down wages. The printers blocked against him, but found that he had the support of the other trade-unions. They sent a deputation to the carpenters' union, and laid the facts of the case before them. The reply was: « Printers be d—! We're going to vote for the liberal candidate! » The fight was close, but the printers had the satisfaction of keeping the candidate out. Funds contributed to outside and unknown leagues may be employed for criminal purposes, for which the contributors must share the responsibility. In the recent miners' strike, the miners assaulted, stoned, and nearly killed men who held aloof from their league. Members of the shearers' union not only forcibly seized non-union men and kept them illegally in durance, but went so far in one instance as to poison a well with arsenical sheep-dip, whereby thirty men were made seriously ill, and their lives endangered. It should be a standing rule with every trade (as it appears to be with most) to keep its union funds strictly for its own purposes. In fact, it would be well if the law of the country made this one of the conditions of registration.