The Arbitration Act.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19144, 29 October 1927, Page 14

The Arbitration Act.

With the labour unions protesting vehemently against the comparatively trifling alterations in the Arbitration Act -which the Government has proposed, and a considerable section of employers hardly less vigorously opposing the idea that the Act should be abolished, it is unlikely that the present Parliament will make any material change in the law. The discussion which took place at the conference of Chambers of Commerce yesterday may, therefore, not have the influence upon the Government or Parliament which it ought to have. Yet the discussion was not a waste of time. It was useful for its exposition of the way in which x-epresentative business men look at the statutory regulation of wages and hours, and also for its helping forward the serious consideration of a law which active and progressive minds are in increasing numbers coming to think of as a needless and harmful impedi- ] mont to healthy national development. • What deters many people, from making I a direct attack upon the central prin- ] Uiple of the Aet is partly fear of what '

hey think are incalculable consejuences, partly fear of the menacing atitude of organised Labour (which is ilready talking about sabotage), and partly also the strong clutch of cus:om. The Act has been on the Statute Book for thirty years, and lias been a powerful and constantly visible and operative instrument throughout that time. Its enactment coincided, almost, with the beginning of a long period of prosperity, for which the Act had as little to do as the phases of the moon. The country, when the turn of the century came, was in a position to bear without any difficulty the economic cost of the Act. It is only in the last few years that the severity of that cost has begun to be felt and seen, and it cannot be expected that employers and the public generally will ?asily rid themselves of the false ideas concerning the Act which were fostered—or, rather, see clearly the truth which was masked —by more than two decades of prosperity. 'Other countries which are at least as prosperous as New Zealand, and in which the condition of the worker is at least as good as the condition of the New Zealand worker, have not found it necessary to maintain a tribunal for the fixing of wages or even machinery for the- settlement of disputes. In those countries the skilful and industrious worker and the skilful and progressive employer receive their reward, and this would happen in New Zealand if statutory wage-fixing were abolished and the State contented itself with only so much power of intervention as is conferred upon it by the Labour Disputes Investigation Act. In the meantime the conference of Chambers of Commerce, if it does not care to advocate the abolition' of wagefixing, ought to support the Bill now before Parliament and urge the Government to provide that no award oi the •Court shall direct that preference be granted to unionists.