and
taking the row to the police, that some group of left wing
workers would certainly come into collision.
Cement
The next dispute was in the Sehmidt factory and here
again the dispute was about an assault upon an Australian
foreman by some left wing workers, again not an industrial
dispute.
1
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Lastly, there was the dispute in the artificial flower
factory where there was some dispute over piece rates, but we
in the Labour Department were never able to get to the truth of
it and exactly what the dispute was about. In this case they
did their level best for weeks to offer their services as
conciliators between workers and management. The manager holed
There was up in a hotel, nobody would find out where he was.
some difficulty in finding out where the union headquarters was.
It was not where it was supposed to be, moved without telling
anybody. We did find them. The conciliator rang them and
offered to do all we could to help. All that happened, the girl .
at the other end of the telephone chanted the thoughts of Mao
and every time they rang up to offer their services all they
got was chanting.
It is not very easy for any conciliation organisation to operate under these conditions. In the end, of course, it
was possible for the conciliating people in the Labour Department
to get the factories opened and going again because a lot of
the workers came along to the Labour Department and said we do
not agree with all this, we would like to go back to work and we
were able to arrange this. This was weeks later.
So that is the extent of the truth in the story that
this started as a genuine labour dispute. There was a genuine labour dispute element in one of these but what actually ahppened
was that the left wing union members started picketing this
factory, then they started beseiging it and then started to
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