TRADES UNIONISTS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2560, 22 July 1909, Page 7

TRADES UNIONISTS.

hope— indeed, we do not doubt—thehworkers are paying attention ie .behavior of some of the paid secretaries of the trades unions. In Christchurch the noisy and voluble Socialists on the Trades and Labor Council have succeeded in driving some of the more sensible unions into dissociating themselves from the Council. In this city, and. in other parts, tradesunion secretaries are not only doing little or nothing to assist in/dealing with the unemployed diulculty, but are as everybody knows, seriously checking the movements of private benevolence by their intolerable'demand that full award rates must bo paid on any relief works that are established. The trades-unionists are only a small fraction of the workers, and the agitators who appear to have obtained the upper hand in the labor organisations assuredly do not reflect* the general feeling even of the trades-unionists. The name “trades-unionist” has already . taken on an unpleasant significance which does not attach to it in other 'countries. The public’s mental dictionary holds, the definition of a unionist as a conscienceless and rapacious man with no sense of justice or fair play whatever. Nothing could he more Inaccurate and unjust than that estimate of the average union worker. He suffers from his felly in allowing his affairs to remain in the hands of leaders whose chief concern is to shape “the labor movement” to their personal advantage, to stir up strife, and to make a show of intellectual business by uttering .wild absurdities upon every sort of political question. Organised labor is in very had hands, and it cannot hope ever to obtain sympathetic 1 consideration from the public, or to break down the hostility of the public to trades-unionism, until it secures wiser, more devoted, and mere unselfish men to lead it.—“ The Dominion.”