Cotton Negotiations While it is all to the good that
the Lancashire textile employers and operatives are still conferring about their disputes, there is no sign_ of any return of the weavers to their work and the spinners' notices will expire in mid-October. The weavers' unions have repudiated the claim of a committee of extremists to represent the Burnley strikers, whose intervention would in any ease not have cased the situation. The weaving trade conference, with a Government official in the-chair, has made some progress with its main task, which is to restore the collective bargaining that the employers most unwisely terminated in the early summer. But the thorny question of a wage reductions necessitated, in the employers' view, by the depressed state of the industry, and the still thornier question of the reinstate- ment of strikers have yet to be faced. If employers and employed in the spinning section of the trade would agree upon a wage reduction without stopping the spindles, the moral effect on their colleagues in the weaving section would no doubt be considerable. But, like many previous controversies in Lancashire, this dispute threatens unhappily to be long drawn out.
* * * *
Previous page
