Trades and the Workers

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 216, 1 December 1927, Page 13

Trades and the Workers

BY

BOXWOOD

UNION MEETINGS DUE - Tramways .. .. To-night Ferry Employees .. To-night Electrical Workers .. .. To-night Shipwrights December 5 Drivers .. .. December 5

Arbitration Court Hamilton session begins December 9. Auckland session begins December 12. Conciliation Councils Chemical and Manure Workers . Dec. 5 Ferry Workers Dec. 5 Canister Workers ~ Dec. 8 * * * Mr. E. Wadham, secretary for the Gasworks Employees’ Union, is having a few days off owing to illness. * * * The Chemical and Manure Workers met employers in conciliation two days this week, and though the disput has not been finalised a complete settlement is hoped for. Canister workers are claiming a five-day week in the dispute which will come before a Conciliation Council on December 8. The claims also ask for a general increase in wages, and the alteration of the overtime rates. The award, which has just expired after being in operation for three years, provides for a 47 hour week. Canister workers are having a busy time just now. There is no one unemployed in the trade. Nor are there any sheet metal workers out, though the general engineering section is particularly quiet. * • • Storemen in Taranaki are to have for their secretary Mr. A. South, secretary of the timber workers and once secretary of the building trade union in Blenheim. The union has had a secretary engaged in the trade, but under such an arrangement the best of secretaries would have insufficient time and insufficient freedom of action. * * * To-morrow the tramway men are taking up a collection over the whole staff for the Community Play Association, and other avenues for assisting those who have suffered under unemployment. The collection was decided on at a general meeting held on November 1. It has been decided that it will not be spent in subsidising any work at which men get less than the trade union rates of pay. Tramwaymen Meet The tramwaymen are holding a general meeting to-day to discuss the new agreement made with the City Council and to receive the report of the delegates to the Napier conference. The union is also hearing the case of a unionist who is appealing against a recent appointment of an inspector. He claims that he was wrongfully passed over when a recent appointment was made to the staff of inspectors. Abattoir Section Conciliates The abattoir section of the Slaughtermen’s Union met the employers in conciliation recently and as a result the Arbitration Court will have incomplete recommendations before it next {sittings. The wages clause and various other questions, among which is the fate of the “long. shank,” are left to the court. The long shank has been referred to before in this column. It is, if it needs an explanation, the short piece of not very useful nor ornamental bone which dangles from the forequarter. It is a sheer piece of superfluity, whUbh the consumer pays for in cash and the abattoir men in blood and accidents. For it is a very dangerous cut-H)ne of the most dangerous in the trade —and the men. are \bent on eliminating it.

Migration to Australia Furniture trade workers are seeking better pastures in considerable numbers. Some of the best tradesmen are flocking to Australia, where wages are good and employment better. The only branch of the trade that is having anything like a good run in Auckland is the upholstering. Relative to this.trade, there is an interesting document at the Trades Hall just now. It is the award or regulations under which Chinese furniture factories in Sydney are working. Under it no person is allowed on the premises before 7.45 a.m. or after 5.30 p.m., or on Saturday, Sunday or a holiday, except the watchman. Meals cannot be taken in the factory after 5.30 p.m. or before 7.45 a.m., and the working hours must not exceed 44 a week. Lunch time must be not be less than 45 minutes. The factory cannot have a way in or an exit except to a public street. The minimum wage for piecework is £6 Is a week, and on day work £5 10s a week, and no factory working day work can adopt piecework except with 5 the consent of the Employers’ Association, and the union. No work can be done except in the factory and no employee shall make goods for himself or for any other employer. No European can work in a Chinese factory except he is engaged from the union, and no junior can be engaged except with the consent of the conciliation committee, nor can one be employed unless indentured, even though he may be paid the adult wage. Another provision states that a clock and a first-aid outfit must be maintained in the factory. The wages clauses in the award are relied on to keep out the worst form of yellow competition, and for the other part the Chinese worker is so slow and so painstaking and methodical that he makes competition hard for himself under the present organisation of industry, Auckland has a solitary Chinese furniture maker in Grey Avenue. Among the queer ideas of the Chinese in handling tools is their practice of pulling the plane toward themselves instead of following the European custom of pushing it. Continuation Pay Industrial peace is in the boom just now in the United Kingdom. Here is a suggestion proposed by Professor D. H. Macgregor in a presidential address to a section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and Learning: “In respect of wages disputes in fundamental industries, it seems to be a possible addition to our methods that, when negotiations have narrowed the issue to its smallest differences, and there is yet no agreement, the disaster of stoppage might be averted if the trade union could be enabled, pending an arbitration, to advance to its members the whole or part of the difference iir question, subject to guarantee of being refunded as much of its claim as the award sustained. This might be called the method of ‘continuation pay.’ It would always be less than strike pay, since the latter is about twofifths of wages, while the difference in dispute would not often be as much as half of that. The union would therefore suffer less even if the award went against it. There is some approximation to this method in the occasional practice of’antedating awards, but the community is not thereby cleared from the loss o fa stoppage.” Apprentices in Engineering' Most boys have at some time or another a distant hankering after becom- ;

ing engineers, but if they or their parents would take the advice of men of long experience in the trade, they would look before they took the jump, for several branches of the trade are utterly overcrowded. The story goes back to 1915* when the unions obtained from Mr. Justice Stringer an order fixing the proportion of apprentices at one to two. But before the ink was dry on the court’s order the employers made an appeal stating that so many men were going overseas, either to the line or into munition factories, that it would be impossible to carry on without a larger proportion of apprentices. So the court “about turned” and made the proportion two to one. And there it remained for years, until the Auckland branch of the Engineering Union got an alteration two years ago to one to one.

Few men can claim better acquaintance with the needs of the engineering trade than Mr. R. F. Barter, secretary of the union, a member of the Seddon Technical College Board of Governors and secretary of the Engineering Trades’ Apprenticeship Committee. And this is what he states in reply to the impression created by various bodies of employers that the unions are simply trying to keep youths out of the trade: —“From my personal experience, I know that the proportion of apprentices is still far too large. I don’t wish to keep lads out of the trade but I wish to safeguard their future.” He made a definite statement that during the last 12 months several boys had been dismissed from their employment immediately they came out of their time. So narrow is the scope for engineering in New Zealand that they have not a ghost of a chance of getting work./ Their five years are wasted. “We advise parents before placing their boys to any branch of the fitting and turning to make full inquiries into the possibility of following their trade in the future. Most boys pick on fitting and turning which, with the large proportion of apprentices, is overstocked. Other branches, cuppersmithing, brass finishing, blacksmithing and pattern-making, boys do not seem inclined to follow. There are not a dozen blacksmith apprentices in the province, and the other branches mentioned are also short of their proportions. One of the branches that has grown greatly with the motor trade is sheet-metal working, which has called for panel beaters and radiator makers.”