FROM THE ARCHIVES:Cork was particularly badly hit by strikes in response to employers' efforts to cut pay within months of the end of the Civil War, as outlined by this editorial. –
JOE JOYCE
THE STATE of Cork, as our Special Correspondent describes it to-day, is both lamentable and astonishing. Cork is, for purposes of trade and commerce, one of the most favourably situated cities in the world. It has an admirable harbour; it lies upon the greatest highway of ocean traffic; it is the capital of a fertile province; its railway communications with the rest of Ireland are ample and excellent.
Yet, in these piping times of peace, Cork is, to all intents and purposes, a beleaguered city. It has been living from hand to mouth for more than a week, and now it is faced with an alarming shortage of the necessaries of life.
The coal supply is exhausted, and after to-day the hotels may be unable to provide their clients with cooked food. The city’s grain bins are all but empty; its stores of flour, sugar and tea are nearly spent and cannot be replaced.
All classes are suffering and, if relief is not furnished quickly, the hardships of the poor and unemployed – most of the population of Cork is unemployed – must become acute. The general distress is the result of a series of labour disputes which, coming one on top of another, have sealed all communications and have paralysed all industry.
The first was the dockers’ dispute, which closed all the harbours in the Free State, including the Port of Cork. Then the Employers’ Federation, unable any longer to endure the burden of extravagant wages, was compelled to enforce reductions in every branch of trade.
The result was a general and simultaneous strike of the city’s workers, whose pickets are preventing the importation of food by rail. Fourteen trade unions are involved in the dispute – dockers, grain porters and shop assistants of every kind. Hitherto attempts to secure a settlement have been in vain.
The Ministry of Industry and Commerce is making another effort to bring the disputants together, and in the meanwhile it is a case of least said soonest mended . . .
The outstanding facts about the dispute at Cork and elsewhere are two in number. One is that all industry throughout the Free State is being throttled by rates of wages which forbid fair competition with the less heavily burdened industries of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Even if the workers in Dublin and Cork succeed in maintaining the present rates of wages for the time being, their victory must be short-lived. They will discover very soon that they have involved capital and labour in equal ruin. The real alternatives are lower wages and no wages at all.
The other fact is that the general strike, carried to extremes, is the most cruel and most uneconomic of all weapons of controversy. Its losses consume the fruits of victory, even where victory is possible; and its cruelties are inflicted chiefly on the poorest and most helpless members of the community.
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