ENG-1952 — Page 61

OCCUPATION, WAGES AND LABOUR ORGANIZATION

since negotiated a comprehensive agreement with the management securing considerable improvement in wages, hours, holidays and piece-work rates.

The above two cases were the only major disputes which resulted in stoppages of work during the year, but the same pattern was clearly discernible in numerous other disputes which were not pushed quite so far. In almost every instance the mediation of the Labour Department was not sought until the dispute had reached a point at which very little could be done, and even when the department was called in earlier it was usually found that negotiations were frustrated because the union representatives made no attempt to arrive at an agreement but used the joint meetings as a forum for the parrot-like repetition of a certain set of catch- words which bore little or no relation to the matter under discussion. The similarity of the phraseology used and its constant repetition by young, paid union secretaries who took a disproportionate part in the con- duct of all discussions left little doubt that the tactics adopted on these occasions formed part of a carefully prepared general strategy, which was designed not to further the interests of the workers but to exploit and widen every breach between workers and employers. This object was further pursued by calculated distortion and misrepresentation of the facts in certain sections of the vernacular press, and there is reason to believe that similar methods were used by representatives in report- ing to their members at union meetings. In one case negotiations, which had covered a period of four to five months and which had resulted in acquiescence by the management in a new agreement embodying about 98% of the workers' demands, appeared to be on the point of breaking down completely when the management decided to call a general meeting of their workers and

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