A general lock-out in the cotton industry in Lancashire is
threatened. We have described fully elsewhere the reasons for the grave decision which the Committee of the Employers' Federation took on Tuesday. As we write on Friday morning there seems to be some hope that the strike at the Beehive mills at Bolton, on which the whole situation turns, may be brought to an end by the withholding of further strike pay. The position of the local union which is paying the strikers is rather obscure. We have written in our leading article as though the local union were in deliberate revolt against the union officials at headquarters, but it seems that the strike pay which the local union has been dispensing really comes from headquarters and not from the local union's own funds. If that he so, it would be unfair to speak of the local union as in revolt in the full sense in which we used the term. The explanation would be that the local union had had large powers delegated to it by head- quarters, and that it committed headquarters to strike pay. Strike pay, therefore, has been provided, as it were, auto- matically, although the headquarters officials have repudiated the strike. If there be some doubt as to the exact extent of the revolt there is enough evidence that it is wide and dangerous. If the trade union officials cannot control their men, trade unionism will suffer a calamitous blow, and that in the county where collective bargaining is organized better than anywhere in the world.
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