POSTAL WORKERS AT LAW
Sta,--e-In your issue of May 7th you comment on the attitude of Post Office workers in their decision to approach the General Council of the T.U.C. with a view to their re-affiliation to that body. Your comment would imply that the Union of Post Office Workers' action is indefensible and that, as a union, we are embarrassing the T.U.C. in this expression of our impatience. I am sure that in the calm and detached atmosphere of editorial comment you do not realise how deep is the resentment we feel at the Trades Union and Trades Dispute Act. Since 1927 members of the Union of Post Office Workers have been patient under the injustices that the Act has put upon them. It is knot generally known that the Act placed our delegates to the Postal International in the same position as those of Italy and Germany. Indeed, it has been bitterly said that the Tracks Union and Trades Dispute Act was in the field as Fascism before Hitler was heard of. The war has aggravated our resentment, d when you say " that the ethics of the precipitate action had nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of our claim" I wish you would also remember that the precipitate action is born of the feeling that the rightness of our claim has been deliberately ignored over the years.
I welcome the latter portion of your comment, in which you express a far more enlightened attitude- towards the worker in war-time than s shown by that section of the Government which is still living in the ign of Queen Victoria. You say that the whole conception of modern ustry is of a system in which organised unions, are playing an indis- nsable part. How true that is. Can you blame a postal worker who, g all the signs around him and hearing all the talk of democracy d freedom, remembers that this Clause V is still an implement in the nds of those whose conception is that of a divided nation?—Yours
ncerely, T. J. HODGSON, General Secretary. Union of Post Office Workers, U.P.W. House, Gresceru Lane, Clapham Common, London, S.P. 4.
[Temperately as the Postal Workers' contention is stated by their eneral secretary, it cannot be admitted. To a minority aggrieved by law one constitutional course is open—to convince a majority of the ustice of its case and get the law repealed or amended. To choose stead deliberately to defy the law is to undermine the whole system of tic government on which the rights and security of postal workers every other citizen depend.—ED., The Spectator.]
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