THE Sun FRIDAY, MAY 18, 1928. A DEADLOCK ON ARBITRATION

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 357, 18 May 1928, Page 8

THE Sun FRIDAY, MAY 18, 1928. A DEADLOCK ON ARBITRATION

IN response to the cry for peace in industry and improved conciliation machinery for keeping the peace, the Industrial Conference at Wellington has failed, so far, to meet these clamorous needs with an acceptable scheme. Its special joint committee, which was set up to consider all aspects of the industrial laws, came to grips on the vital question whether the exercise of arbitration should be voluntary or coercive, and, at the moment, there is no prospect of a compromise. The deadlock is to be regretted. If the conference should fail to achieve its main jiurpose, it will have failed in everything. The lesser aims that hit the mark will not make up the score lost in the major aim that missed it. Without any material reservations at all, both sides agreed to accept the principle of arbitration, hut they differed and agreed to differ on the method of starting the existing or subsequently improved conciliation machinery. Breaking new ground, for some reason not yet impressively explained, the employers’ representatives stood for optional reference of industrial disputes to the Arbitration Court or other tribunal for final settlement. On the other side, keeping to a familiar path which industrial unionism sometimes has abandoned for more perilous short-cuts, the workers’ representatives held to the present system of compulsory reference to the court or other tribunal. What “other tribunal” was in their minds? If the joint committee had in view a picture of a more effective tribunal than the Arbitration Court, which, like the obliging old man in the fable who carried his over-ladened donkey to please everybody, pleases nobody, the committee ought to have given the country the delight of seeing the vision splendid. In the meagre argument for and against the vital point of difference between the two parties represented on the committee — parties which, by the way, appreciably suppressed their partisan character for the promotion of the conference purposes —the workers’ representatives were by far the more logical and convincing. It is quite true that, in practice, the so-called compulsory arbitration has not always been compelling, hut such compulsion as has been effected has given more benefit both to employers and workers than that secured by optional arbitration in other countries. Unless, in the process of transition that is going on throughout the world, the nature of industrialists, controllers and operatives, has changed for the better and out of all recognition, one fears that a reversion to optional conciliation would be more disruptive industrially than compulsory arbitration has been or ever could be. Of course, there is no lack of precedent for the employers’ turnabout to optional reference of disputes to the Arbitration Court or other tribunal. Since 1896, voluntary or optional resort to investigation, conciliation, and arbitration by competent tribunals has been the favoured system in Great Britain. At the opposite extreme New Zealand and Australia are the most conspicuous examples of compulsory arbitration, each moving in practice all the time to using the Arbitration Court as statutory machinery for fixing wages without always giving due regard to all the economic! factors of the problem. Altogether, changes have been made in the conciliation and arbitration machinery of some thirty countries within the past half-dozen years, and none of them has hit upon the perfect system. So there is no reason for a hopeless deadlock or despair in this bewildered political territory. The Industrial Conference should make another attempt to reach acceptable finality. SUCH IS FAME ! A SCREEN actor, Adolphe Menjou, married in his native Paris, a screen actress, Kathryn Carver, and the couple arrived in London on their honeymoon. Their motor was rushed by mobs of “wild women,” frantic with curiosity to see the idol and his bride. It took years of hard soldiering for Napoleon to become famous; he waded through blood to a throne. Princes to-day are only noticed when they abandon their wives. Great authors and painters often present “the dull, cold ear of death” to popular acclamation, first having been interred in what would have been paupers’ graves but for the charity of friends as poor as themselves. Science has taken the lives of slaves who, working with no other thought than that of benefiting their fellow men, have crumbled to dust long before the world has discerned their virtues and their value. Celebrated actors on the legitimate stage win to fame only by intense study and inexhaustible industry, supported by real genius. But the screen will make worldfamous in a day the picture fool, the picture hero, or the picture knave. To-day there are men and women known in every part of the civilised world, praised, flattered, idolised, who but a few months or a few years ago were but units among countless million human ants, coming and going, unknown and unnoticed. A handsome or a pretty face, an ugly or a comic face, a magnificent or skeleton or fat frame, an extraordinary activity or an extraordinary lethargy—and there you are ! You are something out of the ordinary, and if you are extraordinarily extraordinary, the cameraman will get you, and you will gesture dramatically or ridiculously—and the screen will show your genius, your loveliness, or your mere absurdity to all the peoples of the earth in one roll of the film. The old-time actor or actress, could make appeal to one audience at a time; a film actor may perform to a thousand audiences at once. Toni Mix is the delight of all native peoples; to them he is a veritable god ; a popular vote would make him Emperor of the South Sea Islands to-morrow. Such is fame! Still there is much that is great and good, much that is highly educative, and much that is truly entertaining in the films. They are the amusement of rich and poor alike, a truly democratic institution.