TRADE UNION TYRANNY.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2526, 12 June 1909, Page 2

TRADE UNION TYRANNY.

THE LATEST FROM NEW YORK

Now that prosperity is rewiving in the eastern states (writes the New York correspondent of the “Daily .Telegraph”), and the big building operations which were suspended during tfie slump are again reopening, one heat's the customary criticism of coercion, and domination by tlio labor unions. It is complained that under the Ameri.can system tho “walking delegates/’ as they aro called, are invested with Czar-like power, which frequently becomes a inenace to Industry, and these ‘delegates are “fx-equently idle, dissolute knaves, who make it their business to curtail production, hamper industry, and blackmail employers.” In the American metropolis the hod-car-riers made a rule that no man should use more than one hand in filling his bod. Another rule is that no hod-car-rier may carry a stone, bo it a pebble or a capstone. He would be fined for handling it. The plasterers have a regulation that men must.be employed in the order of their application. If a lazy drunkard .appears for work in the morning and is denied, and a steady competent man appears in the afternoon and is put to work, the employer will be obliged to dismiss the good man and take on the bail man, or keep both, and pay the good-for-nothing the same ■as the other. In a certain skyscraper at New York there was laid a bronze sill. It had been in position for some weeks when it was discovered that the pattern from which the sill had been east had been made by a non-union patternmaker. The wicked man had since joined the union, but when he made that pattern he was a “scab.” Tlic union ordered the owner to take out the sill, have it broken up, and get it recast from a pattern made by a union man. lie told thorn to go to Florida, whereupon they called out all the men on the building, nearly 300 in number, and they remained out for six weeks. Then the owner was obliged to surrender, but before tho men would go back he had to pay in full their , wages for all tho time they had been idle.