COMPULSORY ARBITRATION.

Motueka Star, Volume I, Issue 20, 18 October 1901, Page 3

COMPULSORY ARBITRATION.

—o — There is scarcely a day (says the San Francisco Argonaut in its leading columns) that we do not see in some journal the New Zealand scheme of "compulsory arbitration" prescribed as a panacea for all industrial ills. We cannot comprehend what these empiric physicians mean. No law in a free Republic can force a man to work for an employer against his will: no law can furce an employer to hire him. if the law could force the employer to hire a certain man or men—which is absurd — cculd it force him to go 011 doing business if he should conclude to stop? These questions, to our mind, settle the compulsory arbitration scheme. We have been curious to see how the coloniol papers regard the matter. The last number of the Australian Mining Standard to hand says that throughout the colonies the exactions of the unions are driving employers out of business, particularly in New Zealand, where the compulsory arbitration law prevails. As to its workings, the Standard says:—"Employers can be fineel and imprisoned for contumacy, but unions cannot. The machinery has. therefore run with seeming smoothness, in New Zealand, as judgment has invariably gone against the employer. But once let a decree go against unions, and the law will at once be broken down." This does not seem to be the industrial Eden which the advocates of compulsory arbitration have painted NewZealand to be. Messrs Brownlee and Co of Havelock are following a novel manner of eradicating blackberries anel briars growing in the vicinity of their tramway in the Pelorus. The locomotive is hitched on to a patch, a few- strokes of the piston and the flame of the match eloes all that is necessary