Strikes

With more than 1,300,000 unemployed, Britain is gripped by two strikes and menaced by a third. The first is a farm laborers' strike, involving 10,000 hands, in Norfolk. The farmers say that they cannot pay the present scale of wages and escape bankruptcy. The farm laborers state that they cannot exist on the present wages, and demand an increase. In the meantime milk maids and police-men are doing the farm work. King George, who farms one of the largest estates in Norfolk--the Sandringham estate--has sided with the laborers, as have some of the other large landowners. The King has refused to give notice of a wage reduction, and has intimated that if the result of the farmers' and workers' parley is abortive, he will make separate arrangements with his men. The second is a strike about the employment of non-unionists in South Wales. The dispute is purely an inter-union affair, but 17,000 miners are idle. It is feared that they may repudiate the national miners' wage agreement of two years ago. The third strike is threatened by building operatives, who have rejected their employers' offer of increased hours and decreased wages by a majority of three and a half to one. There will be further negotiations before an actual stoppage occurs.