DISQUIETED TRADE UNIONISTS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3112, 7 January 1911, Page 3

DISQUIETED TRADE UNIONISTS.

LEADERS AND WORKMEN

The “Nation,” seeking to account for the unrest among trade unionists, says that “Real wages have not increased at all in ten years. Meanwhile the workmen have been educated. Their standard of life has gone up. They.are not satisfied with tilings as they are, but they look ahead and see no future for their class. “Then they turn to their unions and tlieii leaders, and they find their leaders far away and sitting in comfortable rooms in Manchester or in London, negotiating with employers on a business basis, converted externally and perhaps in their mental make-up into middle-class men, remote and Olympian it may be. in their attitude to the petty troubles in the workshop bv ’.lees or Tyne. For good or for evil the trade union official is no longer the workman clad in fustian, with hands grimy from a day’s work. He has become a man ol figures and pigeonholes and typewriters, remote, halt-estranged from his constituents. This at the best. “The terms- that the Shipowners' Federation have imposed are not easy terms. They are open to the interpretation that tlu> shipowners desire to use the trade union machinery for their own ends, to compel the union to coerce the men who revolt against the conditions of employment. “How can the organisations that have become national in extent he made elastic and human enough to keep in touch with the living interest of the individual member who is smarting under the tyrannv of a foreman, or who resents the new rules of his. own partieulai .simp? How can trade unionism be saved from its own success? How can it win hack-rts vital touch with -the man in the forge and the factory? That is the problem which the labor troubles of this vear have sprung upon an unsuspecting world and until it is solved we must look for a period of the recrudescence of an order of dispute which we had all hoped to have left behind.”