THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, JULY 28, 1908. ATTEMPTING THE IMPOSSIBLE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9153, 28 July 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. TUESDAY, JULY 28, 1908. ATTEMPTING THE IMPOSSIBLE.

In attempting: to achieve an impossibility, the Government has, quite naturally, failed. It has attempted, for years past, to regulate, per medium of the Conciliation Board and Arbitration Court, all the details of the relationships between master and man. Such efforts are bound, to be useless,- and worse than useless, for they promote friction, which injuriously affects both employer and employeo. The spirit of the Government in formulating the Conciliation and Arbitration Act was entirely right. The Government wished for industrial peace -it desired that strikes should never take place—a very laudable desire indead, but the Government has been, and is, altogether wrong in attempting to prevent strikes by coercion. If instead

of instituting, and wasting money on, Conciliation Boards and Arbitration Courts, the Government had passed laws providing for minimum wages, and the hours to be worked, of those engaged in various trades throughout the Dominion, sweating would have been done away with and the good worker would naturally have secured more than a minimum wage. A system that results in uniform wages, and that is what the minimum wage awards of the Arbitration Court amount tp, is not satisfactory. There is as much difference between the ability of one employee and another as there is difference in the capacity of one employer and another. It would be tyranny to compel men to work for those in whose employ they did not wish to remain; yet if strikes are illegal, then the workers are bound by law, or it is hoped so to bind themy to work under conditions that are not congenial to them. The system of awards that exists in New Zealand is altogether wrong," and tends to strangle industrial enterprise. If industries are not encouraged the result practically is to curtail the workers' means of livelihood. The Unions are, of course, dishonest in taking advantage of the awards of the Arbitration Court and then resorting to strikes, but we can understand their declining to part with their natural right to strike. 0 > Saturday last the Trades and L&bour Councils, in Conference at Wellington, passed a resolution, part of which reads as follows: —"That while the Conference! regrets the present industrial unrest in the Dominion, the Conference considers that those trade unions which have used their industrial combination to better their working conditions, by other means than are provided under the Conciliation and Arbitration Act, were more than justified, and extends to those unions its hearty congratulations on the success of their efforts." Nothing is clearer than this, that Arbitration Act, or no Abitration Act, the workers are determined to strike when they want to do so. On broad lines the Government should regulate industrial conditions, but it should not attempt to go into details. The folly of attempting to do ao 19 demonstrated by the failure of the Arbitration Act to prevent strikes, and the countless award* throughout the Dominion. There is, we should imagine, something approaching an award per head of the population. The Government, so far as it can reasonably do so, should prevent sweating. After that,, employer and employee should be allowed: to settle all details according' to the requirements and conditions of whatever their trade may be;; and, no doubt, wages boards, not endowed with coerciveor arbitrary power, would be able to facilitate disputes, and ! assist greatly in the maintenance of amicable relations between employer and e nployed.