SHED HANDS' DISPUTE.

Maoriland Worker, Volume 1, Issue 4, 15 December 1910, Page 4

SHED HANDS' DISPUTE.

We confess that we hare a great deal of sympathy for the workers who find themselves baffled and exasperated by the present administration of the Arbitration Act. The rejection of the request for an award governing the conditions of labour of the shearing-shed hands is a case in point. According to the statement made by Mr Laracy—and the facts do not appear to be in dispute —the dispute regarding the shed hands was quite as properly before the Court as was the shearers' case, in which the Court found itself able to make an award. The Shearers' Union asked for a conference with the employers to discuss the conditions of labour of" both shearers and shed hands, and apparently the employers, without replying to the communication directly, filed a reference for a dispute with the shearers. Some time later the Union, anxious that the shed hands should not be left out of the account, filed a reference on their behalf. The Court made its award in the shearers' case, but now declines to take action in the case of the shed hands, on the ground that there was no communication between the parties on the subject before the reference was filed. This sort of thing is

rapidly bringing the Arbitration Court and the Act into disrepute. It might not be quite proper to suggest that mc firm attitude taken up by the shearers influenced the Court in their case, but it certainly influenced the employer*, and the Shearers' Union can hardly be blamed now if it imagines that the only "way to get an award of any sort is to threaten a general strike. The insistence of the Arbitration Court on petty points involving unessential technicalities is quite out of keeping with the spirit of the law. It is very rightly provided that lawyers shall not be employed in these, proceedings;, and the purpose of this provision was simply and solely to minimise the cost of cases and to avoid the labouring of merely contentious technical points. The Arbitration Court is doing its best to defeat the wise purpose of the Legislature, and we can only express our deep regret that it should be so. It has been obvious for a long time that the presiding Judge utterly fails to realise the spirit in which the Act ought to he interpreted, or to get rid of his obsession in the matter of forms and formalities. It is a. matter of some consequence not merely to the workers who have hitherto been the sufferers, but also to the community in general, for the administration is steadily and surely depriving the law of its utility. There is a grow" ing disposition on the part of the workers to organise outside the Act, and it needs no very hard thinking to discover where the tendency is leading. If we were writing on the workers' behalf, we should advise them unhesitatingly to follow the example of the Miners' Federation and perfect their organisation without reference to the Arbitration Act. But it is clear that a general movement in this direction woula be nothing short of a calamity to the cause of industrial peace, and'we should be si ad to see an agitation among the friends of conciliation and arbitration with the object of obtaining from Parliament a plainer instruction to the Court as to the unimportance of trivial formalities and petty technicalities. —Chris tchurch 'Star," 29/11/10