The Dominion. TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 1912. BRITISH INDUSTRIAL REGULATION.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1427, 30 April 1912, Page 4

The Dominion. TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 1912. BRITISH INDUSTRIAL REGULATION.

There are now available by the English mail the text of the Minimum Wage Bill and the exciting debates upon it in the House of Commons. The Bill was introduced by Mb. Asquith as a provisional measure, required as the solution of a grave industrial crisis soluble in no other way, and it actually was a Bill terminable in three years. It merely prescribed certain coal districts, -in each of which a Board would be set up to fix a minimum wage for coal workers; and no coal-owner could without risk of suit contract to pay any miner less than the minimum fixed. The point upon which Me. Asquith chiefly laid stress was the absence of compulsion. There is no compulsion against either a strike or a lock-out, and this is the vital distinction between the Bill and the measures of industrial regulation in force in Australasia. To a New Zealand reader of the speeches\ in the House of Commons and the articles in the newspapers, the two arresting things in the episode of the Bill (which is now an Act) are, first, the lengths' to which general party tactics drove both sides, and, second, the profound ignorance of the pathology of compulsory arbitration which was displayed by the majority of the politicians and the newspaper critics. It was the Unionist press that offended most seriously, although its offence had doubtless a most honest spirit behind it. While most Unionist newspapers fiercely opposed the Bill, on both good and bad grounds—the bad ground was the neglect of the Bill to enforce compulsory arbitration, and the good ground was the fact that while the Bill placed fetters on the mine-owners it left miners free to strike, being thii6 just the lop-sided law that our own Act is—the Times was not unsympathetic. It declared that even the keenest opponent of Syndicalism could not regard the Bill as a surrender to the Syndicalist movement.

The real crux of the situation was the question whether the Bill—introducing, as it did, the principle of a minimum wage without making any provision for the compensatory principle of minimum work—did of did not establish n precedent, inviting all other trades to use the strike weapon to secure similar special legislation or to use the principle of the Bill as the thin end of a wedge to be driven right through the whole body of industry. Mr. Bonak Law asked in the House whether it was "not evident to every man in the House that by this Biil they were inviting every trade which had a powerful organisation to do the same as the miners to obtain the same results." Mn. AsQUITH insisted that the Bill would establish no precedent, and the Liberal press took the same line, declaring that the coal trade was, both as a sort of monopoly and as the bedrock of national existence, a thing distinct and different from _ all other trades. It is extremely interesting to note, on this point, the double anxiety, of the beat Liberal voices,.,

both to persuade themselves and the nation that the Bill would not be a precedent, and to condemn the regulation of wages through Stato action. The Westminster Gazette, for example, was even more urgent than Mr. Asquith in repudiating the principle of compulsory arbitration as we know it in Australasia. "Because this measure," it said, "is applied to the coal trade, it does not follow that compulsory arbitration, with all its consequences, need or will be applied to all trades." And again:

At the present moment that idea [compulsory arbitration] encounters equally the opposition ot tho old trade unionists, who regard tile strike in the last resort as an essential weapon of organised labour, and of tho modern Labour lender who 'has large and vague ideas of-some social regeneration to bo accomplished through the'general strike. Lastly, we imagine that employers are as little ready as either sections of labour to accept compulsory arbitration from tho State as the means of adjusting wages. Whatever may be their complaints against labour or trade unions, the vast majority of them, we rather think, would prefer- to bear the ills they know than to fly to the untried remedy of the State regulation of wages. Mr. Asquith himself declared that no did not favour fixing a particular rate of wages through Act of Parliament, since "'once such a provision was put ir, an Acfc of Parliament .it wotUcl M treated as a precedent." As w _l «iave said, political party necessities largely coloured the arguments of both sides, almost to the exclusion of consideration of the real needs of the many wretchedly paid miners. TheTJiiionists, however, or "Tories," as the Radicals love to call them, endeavoured to substitute for "minimum wage" the term "reasonable living wage," indicating clearly enough the universal feeling that civilisation should aim at securing its children, or its victims, from a lifeless life. At the same time a section of the Unionist press clamoured for industrial compulsion on the Australasian model, and they were supported here and there in Liberal circles, on tho strength of some preposterous statements by Mr. Pember Reeves. Mr. Reeves is quoted by such polar-opposed papers as the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph for his defence of the power of Compulsory arbitration to eliminate strikes and cause industrial contentment in New Zealand. Unless these papers have seriously misrepresented him he appears to have been contending that our Arbitration Act has ended strikes and has won the regard of employers and employed ! It is significant that even in the dire stress of party conflict, even in the face of, and at the risk of, heavy and effective assault by the Unionist party, the best Liberal thought in Britain, led by the Prime Minister, has remembered to denounce the principle of compulsory arbitration on the Australasian model. And it is satisfactory to know, as we do know from the Westminster Gazette, that this theoretical objection to compulsory arbitration has been hardened up by a knowledge of the practical working of tho Australasian laws.