WAGE FIXATION.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3840, 4 September 1928, Page 2

WAGE FIXATION.

OBJECTION TO SYSTEM. Wellington, August 31. “Our federation has always stood for the abolition of compulsion and the statutory fixation of cost of production with the product of the labour dependent on world conditions for realisation,” said Mr. H. D. Acland, when moving the adoption of the eighteenth annual report of the New Zealand Federation. “There can be no question,” he continued, “ that the cost of production within the Dominion is higher than the national income or the conditions in various industries warrant! A higher standard of wages can be of no use to the man who cannot obtain work, and I feel sure that the increasing- unemployment is due mainly to the inability of industry generally to find the money necessary to pay the relatively high wages which are, in so many cases, so much out of proportion to the value of the product of the labour.

“A case in point is that of the flax workers, the position with regard to whom was explained by Mr. ,T. A. Nash, M.P., in the House of Representatives. Mr. Nash stated that the industry had had to close down because the men would not accept 13/6 per day to enable the mills to keep going at the reduced price being offered for flax on the. world’s market. The Court’s award rate is 15/- per day, but when this award was made flax was selling at £26 to £27 per ton, whereas to-day it is only fetching £22 10s. The millers suggested that, in order to carry on, the men should accept a reduced rate of pay, but they refused to do this, even although they were promised an increase in rates when an improvement in the market price took place. The result was that 700 men, many of them with families, were thrown out of work, and a large number of these were sent to relief works at 12/- a day. These men preferred to take relief work at 12/- a day rather than continue in their ordinary occupation at 13/6. “This, I maintain,. is a result of our pernicious system of wage fixation, and if unemployment is to be met on commonsense lines, industries dependent on world market values for their products must have entire freedom from all restrictions with regard to production costs.”