LAWS BROUHGT INTO CONTEMPT.

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 56, 22 March 1937, Page 4

LAWS BROUHGT INTO CONTEMPT.

Our Minister of Railways has evidently taken to heart the lesson to be learned from the strong feeling; arousedj throughout the Dominion by the methods adopted by his colleague, the Minister of Labour in his handling of the "stayin" strike by the employees at Auckland freezing works. We now have Mr SuMiran delivering a sharp rebuke to a Railway Union offical for even suggesting the possibility of the Minister having to intervene in a dispute tliat had arisen at any rate untl all other prescribed methods of settlement had been exhausted. In this he h'as, of course, to some extent followed the example of the Minister of Public Works. In each case, however, these are departmental affairs which leave the Minister concerned as the final abriter. What the country, struggling onto its industrial feet again, really requires is that some definite steps should be taken to cheek the practice, now becoming almost universal, of making the strike, or something like it, the first recourse directly any difference arises between employers and trade unionist employees. This is » practice that has grown vastly since the Labour Government took office and has now become so common as to be regarded as a normal condition of our industrial life. ... The Government can scarcely but be fully conscious of this, nor can it be blind to the a.dverse effect it must have upon the economic recovery of the country. Every one of these strikes, entered upon on the very slightest provocation and as often as not with no serious grievance to be remedied, acts as a deterrent to the establishment of new industries and services and to the expansion of those already in existence. The Government deems it necessary to create what it terms "new money" for carrying on its own trading ventures. But there is really an abundance of private capital awaiting investment in wage-paying undertakings that would help very materially to a permanent reduction in the ' numbers of tlie unemployed. There cannot, however, but be considerable; hesitation about committing this capital irrivocably to industrial concerns so 'long as it is felt that operations may at any moment, and at frequent interv.als, be held up by the arbitrary action of the employees. So far this Government has done very little, if anything, to check resort to these tactics and, indeed, as in the cass of the Auckland freezing works, has done a good deal to encourage it. That this should be the case with a Labour, Government, under which we were promised that industrial troubles of the kind would be a thing of the past, cannot but come as an unpleasant surprise even to members of the lawabiding unions. Whatever the Hon. Armstrong may have to say to the contrary, by his own actions and by the apparent indifference towards it of the Government generally, the prestige and authority of the Industrial Arbitration Court have been badly undermined — at any rate among trade unionists. At the same time, of course, observance of its decisions and of all the many irritating and costly restrictions imposed upon employers by recent legis-.ation is being very strictly enforced. It is surely a very p >or law that is not made to work cvenly both ways. But that has certainly come to be the case with the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, which the present Government has itself in m'any ways amended, and in all to the advantage of tlie employees. What the people of the country and espe"ial1y present and prospective employers of labour, want and are entitled to know is whether the Government has any intention to give impartial effect to a law that is virtually of its own making in the interests of the class that it makes its own particular care. It is for it, therefore, to rnake some unequivocal pronouncement in this direction and to stand by it firmly. By so doing it will, in the end, serve the best interests of the wage-earners themselves, while at the same time promoting the return- of general prosperity. May we look to the Prime Minister, as the one to speak with the greatest authoriy, making known his Government 's real intentions before he leaves for the Old Country?