Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/834

 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL the dock managers must fight. He was in {avour, however, of & Board of Conciliation with a standing mpire, though the umpire's decision should have only moral and not legal sanction. With respect to sympathetic striking and sympathetic boycotting, Mr. Wilson, of the Seamen's and Firemen's Union, defended them on the ground tha employers also assisted one another by refusing to employ men who had been engaged in agitation. He admitted, however, that his own union had called inW existence a very serious enemy in the Shipping Federation, and had lost as many as 20,000 members through its operation. Mr. W. Langridge, of Messrs. Gray, Dawes & Co., was pressed hard on the question of overtime on passenger steamers, on which, he said, the same set of hands now wrought continuously on the day before sailing for twenty-three %ours, with three hours off for meals; but he maintained it was impossible to avoid it, because, even though the P. & O. Co. and his own firm agreed to stop it, the German Hansa Line now came to London and would get the goods, and is was impossible to provide an extra set of hands for that particular night, because the men would consider it a grievance to be deprived of their overtime. Among sailors' grievances the most prominent, perhaps, was about their scale of provisions, and a demand was made by some for a legal eight hours' day at sea. Of the evidence on the woolien industry, no part of the official report had been published up to the moment of writing, and the newspaper reports of it have been very brief. The secretary of the Wool-sorters' Association of Bradford, asked for the extension of the Factory Acts to wool-sorters' rooms, inasmuch as this class of opera- tives were subject not only to bronchitis and inflammation, but w a special disease called wool-sorters' disease, due to the hair and dust that flew from the materials they wrought in, and he proposed the compulsory disinfection of wool got from diseased sheep before sorting. Then three representatives of the wool-combers complained of the temperature of their rooms being 90 Fahr. for ordinary and reachiug sometimes as much as 100, but Mr. Arnold Forster, of Messrs. Fison & Co., said he never heard of such high temperatures, and that in his own mill it was never over 70. Boards of Conciliation had been recently established both in the combing and in the weaving industries, but experience of them was as yet small. Mr. Drew, of the Bradford weavers, asked for the prohibition of married women's labour in nilIls, but on the whole the weavers seem to have few special grievances of a serious kind. In connection with factory legislation, Mr. James Henderson, Superintendent of Factory Inspectors for Scotland and the North of England, made a very strong and important complaint, after an experience of thirty years, that the factory inspectors receive no assistance whatever from the workpeople in the execution of their duties. Often the people did everything they could to baffle and hinder the inspector. They gave notice of his approach, crying'Finer,' and when a prosecution was undertaken they frequently denied the facts