COMPULSORY ARBITRATION. The Workers of Great Britain Reject It.

Free Lance, Volume I, Issue 11, 15 September 1900, Page 6

COMPULSORY ARBITRATION. The Workers of Great Britain Reject It.

JUST at the present moment, when we are riding our compulsory conciliation and arbitration to the death, it conies as a surprise to learn by cablegram that the trades unionists of Great Britain have set their faces sternly against this system. There is now sitting at Huddersfield a Trades Union Congress, representing a million workmen, and this congress * has, by an immense majority, negatived a motion by Ben Tillett in favour of the constitution of a judicial Compulsory Arbitration Court, vested with power to enforce awards in trade disputes. • * • This decision is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the Hon. W. P. Keeves, with his good lady, has expended much eloquence in the endeavour to educate the British trades unionist up to the advantages of compulsory arbitration as practised in New Zealand. From time to time, we have been told that the Honourable W. P. was making great headway with his mission, and that the trades unionists of the United Kingdom thought so highly of him and his compulsory arbitration that they would probably run him as a Labour candidate for a seat in the House of Commons. • • • Now, however, we find that the Reeves doctrines haven't made any headway at all. The British trades unionist won't have compulsory arbitration at any price. It is reasonable to conclude from this emphatic decision that he has either heard of the pernicious effect of the system in this country, or that he is more capable of intelligently looking beyond his nose than the trades unionist of New Zealand. Either way you take it, his decision is a very common-sense and logical one. • • * In this country, compulsory arbitration has been a fraud, a delusion, and a snare. The Act was designed to put an end to labour disputes. Its effect, on the contrary, has been to create them. From the day that the Act came into force, trades unionist agitators have used it to foment trouble between employer and employed, and set class against class, and, where there was one dispute previously, twenty immediately sprang into existence. We were promised industrial peace under the Act, but it has given us nothing but industrial strife. Only recently it was announced that the Arbitration Court had considered and dealt with thirty-nine industrial disputes in the course of a few weeks. Why, in the whole history of the colony, prior to the passing of the Arbitration Act, there were scarcely thirty-nine labour disputes altogether. And still the game goes on. At the present time, the Conciliation Boards are busy in every town in the colony, heaping up work for the Arbitration Court. m * * It may be urged that the Act has benefited the working classes in so far that it has given them higher wages. But has it ? This may be true of the match industry, and other notoriously poorly paid trades, but for every example where the effect has been to benefit the worker, a dozen cases may be cited where it has deprived him of his employment. The Court may fix higher wages, but it cannot compel manufacturers to employ men at those wages, and the effect in the boot, saddlery, and other trades has simply

been to cause certain classes of manufactures to be abandoned. In a word, the goods formerly made here are now imported, and the men have lost their employment. • • * But the trades unionists don't see this, and the crafty politicians who are using this law to maintain their popularity are not disposed to open their eyes to it, so that the compulsory arbitration craze is being persisted in to the great injury of our trades and manufactures. By and bye, when the system has worked irretrievable ruin to the industries of the colony, and the trades unionists are crying out for the work they cannot get at any price, they will rise in their wrath and tear this conciliation and arbitration fabric to pieces. Then they will realise the folly of aggressive class legislation, and the absurdity of interfering with the natural laws of supply and demand.