I
had a rather unruly crew somewhere and while they were in some
Australian port the Captain shot one of the crew, and the crew
did not like it. Not unreasonably, I thought. But they had
settled the matter, as they thought, with the police in Australia,
but when the ship came back the Seamen's Union which is, of
course, a communist organisation, took up this dispute and they
started mobbing the offices and chanting in the manager's office
and using all these techniques we have now seen so much of in
furtherance of their dispute with the Royal Inter-Ocean Lindes.
This dispute is nothing to do with the Hong Kong
Government at all and our Labour Department had no status in
the matter at all. It had taken place outside Hong Kong in
Australia and was a dispute between a foreign company and the
Seamen's Union. Not over pay and conditions of service or
anything like that, but over a police matter.
I
What appeared at that time was the demand by the
communists that in this dispute, and indeed in every other
dispute, the police and the Labour Department should not be
allowed to intervene. This became one of the tenets of their
creed and they said that the proper way to conduct disputes of
this kind was directly between the workers and the employers,
by which they meant by the workers intimidating the employers.
The next thing that happened was there was a fight in
a factory between a right wing nationalist foreman and a couple
of left wing workers. As a result of this fight the management
sacked one of these left wing workers for assaulting the foreman.
The left wing then started chanting in the factory and processing
up and down; they got into the police station, started chanting
at the desk sergeant and they had to be put out.
Again, although the Labour Department looked into the
matter, this was not an industrial dispute but a police matter.
But it was at this point it became obvious if these tactics by
the left wing were going to continue then one day somewhere,
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