FARMERS LABOURERS' DISPUTE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9173, 24 August 1908, Page 5

FARMERS LABOURERS' DISPUTE.

1 ARBITRATION COURT'S FINDING. UNION SECRETARY DISGUSTED. Mr James Thorn, the permanent secretary of the Agricultural Labourers' Union, when interviewed in connection with the decision of the Arbitration Court regarding the Farm Labourers' Dispute, said that he could hardly express his • disgust wiith the finding of the Court. During the summing up. before the Court, Mr Justine Sim practically went down on his knees and begged the farmers and sheep owners to give him suggestions on which he could base.n award. He argued and pleaded and cajoled with Mr Jones and Mr Auck- , land to give up their prejudices End j come down and help the Court. To what end, if an award dealing with farm workers was visionary and impracticable and undesirable, and unnecessary and luinous as he now alleges? It comes u> this: tuat the Government and the Parliament of this Dominion give the workers certain definite promises as to the fulfilment and the ratification of those rights, and then it remains with 01 e man—the judge of the Arbitration Court—to absolutely nullify not oily the promises of the Government, but the definite enactments of the Parliament of the country. And what is the learned judge's excuse for this most extraordinary assumption o despotic power? That the award "would be difficult of enforcement, ' that the employers would "resent the attempted interference with their business" and so forth. The difficulty of enforcement is no concern of the court. The enforcement of any award may safely be left to the union concerned; the court is there to carry out the law as it stands. But the Court's finding is so full of instances of weakness and vacillation and illogicalness that it is absolutely impossible to attempt to traverse every special case. The finding as a whole is simply one long rehash of the farmers' arguments—hoary and mossgrown arguments—that had been used and re-used .-since the year one of the Arbitration Act. "However," concluded Mr Thorn, "the breath is by no means out of the body of my union. The Court's attitude has been one of pure 'funk' all the way through, but it has not succeeded in putting the union in an unenviable frame uf mind. We recognise that we have to begin the fight all over again, but we shall be up and doing it within a very short time. The argicultural industry will be in a state of continuous turmoil and unrest until its workers are granted their just rights and privileges according to the law of this land. . . . There is no reason why the very machinery of the Arbitration Act should not be employed to absolutely nullify the whole of the operations of that Act, and that i 3 something against which the workers of New Zealand would rise as one man.' '—Christchurch correspondent of the Wellington "Post."