The “annual” reduction of wages.

*THE WORKER*

Brisbane, January 19, 1895.

The Editoral Mill.

Our Motto: “Socialism in our time.”

The “annual” reduction of wages has taken place in the Newcastle district. The united coal miners made a brief defensive struggle, but the coal barons, like the barons of old, had too numerous a retinue of “free” non-union labourers to permit of anything like an equal fight, and the men went down. There will now be peace for another year, if peace it can be called, when the men who risk their lives in braving the perils of their most dangerous occupation are forced by the prospect of want of employment and consequent semi-starvation to accept an unfair wage. These continual reductions are going to bring trouble or change, there can be little doubt about that. Individual coal proprietors and syndicates may be able to satisfy themselves that all the trouble caused in the Newcastle district by the perpetual lowering of wages is only the outcome of the operation of an unalterable supply-and-demand economic law. But will the men continue to quietly submit? That is the question. Some of the coal owners think they will, according to the remarks of one colliery proprietor, who claimed to express the opinion of the majority of the colliery owners. This gentleman said to a Sydney DAILY TELEGRAPH interviewer during the late strike: “They (the coal “owners”) were indifferent whether the union miners decided to strike or not. A few years ago a strike among the miners was regarded with a certain amount of dread, because no other miners were to be obtained, but each succeeded laying down of tools had resulted in more men, who were formerly only labourers, becoming trained to mining work, and when the trouble ceased these men retained in the district many of them being retained in the mines and refusing to join unions.”

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This is all very well, and is an easy method of dismissing the claims of miners to a fair wage. Yet it is no answer to the query: What is going to be the end of the competition in the coal, the wool, the sugar, and other large producing industries in which an effort is being made to capture for a few syndicates in Australia the world's markets? The acceptance by the miners or the bushmen of a lower rate will not settle the trouble. If lower wages enables Newcastle to compete with Labuan in Borneo, from whence coal is landed in Singapore 12s. 9d. per ton, the coal owners of Borneo, will further reduce wages in order to enable them to successfully compete with Newcastle. Then Newcastle must further reduce, we suppose, and be followed by Labuan with a still lower rate. And the workers – the wage – earners who do most of the work, who risk the dangers, who wear the dirty clothes, and spend half their lives underground like so many rats – they they must suffer all time! It is enough to make one believe the following passage taken from an American writer is literally true: “For more centuries than men can count, might has been, practically, right. The greater insect has preyed upon the lesser, the greater bird upon the smaller; mice have eaten cockroaches in obedience to nature, and cats have eaten mice. The rat ate the malt, the cat ate the rat, the dog worried the cat, and so it goes. The cry of murder is going up day and night from every blade of grass in the fields, from every leaf in the forests. Under nice words and high sounding phrases, but the Nineteenth century is no better and no worse than its predecessors. The weaker must go to the wall!” If this is so, then the Newcastle miners must ask themselves whether they do right in quietly submitting to every reduction that the coal proprietors (who did nothing to place the coal in the ground or take it from out thereof, and who have no moral right to individually appropriate what belongs to the whole community) choose to inflict upon them. The WORKER doesn't recommend Force – never did. But it would prefer to see the Newcastle miners make a more united resistance to the continued demands of coal syndicates for reduced rates. That resistance can be made constitutionally on the lines of a few years ago, when the rugged eloquence of the Newcastle miner was too much for the peace of mind of the non-union blackleg who invariably left the field quicker than he came to it, having been convinced that the coal owners were wrong and the men right.

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While recommending the Newcastle miners not to sit quietly down under injustice, the WORKER wishes it to be distinctly understood that the successful resistance of a reduction in rates or the enforcement of a demand for an increase will not put an end to strife in the Newcastle district. Where there are so many coal companies there is sure to be continual trouble. The ultimate aim of the union miner should be the nationalisation of the coal mines of the colony. Then when the people are the coal proprietors, and the coal syndicates have to turn their brains to some other speculation, the people's representatives will see that the coal miner has the highest current rate of wages until such time as a better method of giving the worker the product of his own labour and his share of the bounties of Nature, presents itself.