The public, like the press, lives from day to day. It is not interested in labour disputes. Labour disputes are not news. It is only when a dispute threatens to end in a strike that headlines are given to it and interest is aroused. But then it is often too late. Tempers have been inflamed; the leaders on both sides have made statements, public statements, upon which, being self-respecting men, they cannot go back. The strike, whose threat made news, occurs, and there is more news; but the dispute which caused the strike has passed unnoticed. The student may find a reference to it tucked away in a corner of last month’s newspaper.

Perhaps that is why the present dispute in the railway industry has caused so little comment. It does not threaten a strike; it is concerned with the question of conciliation machinery, and one can hardly see how that can cause a strike. But the men are restive under wage cuts, the Companies will most certainly resist any claim for a wage advance, and that, in the absence of adequate machinery, might cause a strike.

Up to March 1st last conciliation machinery did exist. It had been set up under the Act of 1921, but the Companies, finding it unsatisfactory, gave notice of withdrawal in 1932, and on March 1st it ceased to function. It must be admitted that the machinery was unsatisfactory; the fiasco of 1932 is enough to prove that. Yet it did serve its purpose sufficiently to show the desirability, and indeed the necessity, of some machinery for settling disputes without an appeal to force.