A CURIOUS SITUATION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3195, 21 May 1909, Page 4

A CURIOUS SITUATION.

A curious situation developed at Wednesday's sitting of the Conciliation Council, at Auckland, when the dispute between the Builders and Contractors' Association and the Builders and Contractors and General Labourers* Union came up for hearing. It seems that at the preliminary conference between the representatives of the employees and the workers a certain scale of wages was unanimously adopted. On Wednesday the assessors for the employers on the Conciliation Council refused to ratify the agreement entered into by the employers' delegates at the conference and asked for an adjournment to discuss the matter further, Mr Harle Giles, Conciliation Commissioner, pointed

Out that by repudiating the agreement accepted by their own delegates the employers were putting themselves in a very anomalous and invidious position, and that unless the terms made by the delegates were to be upheld, it was difficult to see what good could result from these conferences. The commissioner added that he could not imagine that the Arbitration Court would ignore the fact that the representatives of the empbyers had formally accepted certain terms on their behalf, hut, under the circumstances, he granted an adjournment of the case.