Birth of Labour Dept.

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 975, 19 May 1930, Page 8

Birth of Labour Dept.

EDWARD TREGEAR’S EARLY STRUGGLE JUST on forty years ago John Ballance formed his “Bureau of Industries,” as he said, “to bring worker and work together” and generally to control all industries for the physical and moral benefit of those engaged therein. Incidentally he laid the foundation of the Department of Labour. Forty years ago the country was in desperate straits. Men were working for lialf-a-crown a day in Auckland, while slump and depression had nearlv submerged all hope.

The bureau was placed in the charge oi Edward Tregear, and Ballance calmed the tumult in the industrial world by asserting that Tregear would “make the bureau work.” It was easy to say those words, but the translation into reality was otherwise, viewed from Tregear’s side. Everywhere there was chaos, trouble, confusion, obstruction, prejudice—and all that Tregear had was the will to make the bureau work. A man of imagination with the soul of a poet could alone sense the lodestar of industrial order and keep his course steadfastly fixed on it in all weathers. Tregear had that soul and the imagination. A Southampton lad, he had reached New Zealand in time to take a hand in the later Maori wars and then was gold surveyor at Coromandel when that field was young. Later he was in the Waikato native contingent of 1871. In the meantime he had become interested in Maori lore and was president of the Wellington Philosophical Society (18S7). In 1892, the year after the Bureau of Industries was formed, the Factories’ Act, Truck Act, etc., were brought down under the direction of Pember. Reeves, who had succeeded to the portfolio of Labour and was to rival Seddon until he went to London. Tregear was appointed inspector of factories in 1892 and was soon given a team mate in Janies McKay from the West Coast mines, an unimaginative, plodding, honest, straightlaced liberal trade unionist. It was a queer team—one hitching his wagon to the stars, the other amazed at seeing tramcars. Yet this team was decreed by fate to he yoked together until McKay died just at the time that Tregear was thinking of retiring. In 1893 some progress began to be |

apparent and the Labour Department began to emerge in theory. The dawn of a better day was already heralded. Tregear, with a poet’s soul in him struggling to say things, yet with a vein of useful activity, began the publication in that year, of the “Journal of Commerce and Labour.” It became the “Journal of the Department of Labour,” but, pale and thin, it died by official decree in 1917. Even in 1893 he was writing poems, compiling a Maori dictionary and elucidating native anthropology, but his official duties did not stagnate for want of vision. At the same time he started the State Farm—it is now Levin—to absorb labour which could not live by using a pick or shovel, but which might learn to swing an axe or a leg-rope. He applied some of the theories that present-day sociologists advocate. In 1894-6, when Seddon from the Coast had become Minister of Labour and the Arbitration Act was law. the work of the department grew rapidly. It expanded under the troublous days of latter-day Liberalism, and in 1911 Tregear retired. For 20 years he had acted with his vision fixed ahead, always with his heart—a poet’s heart—beating in tune with the hearts of the people. An able, polished withal resolute man, his ideas well grounded, he reared the Department or Labour from a puny infant to be one of the biggest in the State f amidol departments. “CM? j last book of poems, Shadows, he penned a quaint halfappeal that if a man has done anything good he should be told so before he dies, that his ears may hear and his pmse quicken. Whatever niche he mav la *-he WOl *ld of literature he is en*™dto, a P lace in the gallery of men who helped to make New' Zealand. T.W.