BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Tuesdays and Fridays. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1948 INDUSTRIAL UNREST

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 18, 3 February 1948, Page 4

BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Tuesdays and Fridays. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1948 INDUSTRIAL UNREST

With the carpenters on a “go slow” policy at the time when housing is the most urgent need of this country and building therefore one of the foremost of the essential industries, the average citizen will realise with fresh force the drastic effect industrial unrest can have on the well-being of the community at large. There are always two sides to every dispute. To condemn one faction or the other without serious consideration of all the evidence would be to team up injustice with folly. But, it is fairly safe 'to say that, in these enlightened days, the cause of disputes is nearly always related to pay for work. In most industries conditions have progressed to the point where it can be said they are tolerable, even in many cases comfortable.

The wage question is less easy to settle, because rises in wages, when they become general, cause rises in prices. of goods and cancel themselves out in increased living costs. More and more wage earners today are coming to realise that constant demands for higher wages will not solve the problems of how to feed and clothe their families. They are finding that no amount of money in the world can give a higher standard of living unless it has the power to purchase goods, and that'it does not matter whether a man earns £5 or £lO a week unless the £lO will buy twice what the £5 would buy. However, with household costs quite out of hand and price control seemingly nothing but a dream the idea of trying to wring a few more shillings out of the boss’s pocket is one that appeals as a natural palliative to ,the average worker who has his worries and has been too busy making a living all his life to study economics. How can he be expected to realise that there is a limit to the costs any business can stand, and a limit to the extent to which those costs can be passed on to the public without bursting the bubble? To keep himself..afloat, the employer is often compelled to resist demands. Both are victims of circumstances that the Government of the day seems powerless to control, or chooses to ignore.

Recently, a petition sponsored by the 2nd N.Z.E.F. Association was placed before Parliament and elicited frank discussion in which Members of both sides of the House admitted inflation was an urgent problem. The petition claimed that every person in New Zealand was being disastrously affected by declining purchasing power and depreciation! of savings, and that much of the present industrial unrest was caused by inflation, workers being driven to the futile expedient of persuing increased prices by seeking belated rises in wages.

Still, though there was candid admission by several Government speakers that the decline in money values had become a serious problem here as in other countries, as yet there have been no determined steps taken to ar-. rest the trend.

Meanwhile, the worker demands more and more, with which he can buy less and less, because every penny an hour he gains is passed on to the product of his labour and multiplied through a complex marketing system until it not only cancels out but shows a dead loss in purchasing power. The time has come for more co-operation between capital and labour in tackling their mutual problems in a spirit of goodwill, trust and understanding.