ARBITRATION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 8 November 1913, Page 4

ARBITRATION.

The JN'ew Zealand Times, with a supreme indifference for the public welfare, endeavours to prejudice the masses against the employers by suggesting that the very people who are insisting upon the registration of the watersiders' agreement were the strong and uncompromising opponents of the Arbitration Act when it became law. Such a process of reasoning is as dangerous as it is dishonest. The employers may, and probably did fight tlje Arbitration Act when it was first introduced". As law-abiding citizens, however, they have observed the law in its integrity for twenty odd years. And while it remains upon the Statute Rook it .is their duty ,to observe it. They have every fight to contend that if the preference to unionists clause is to be retained to unions whether registered under the Arbitration Act or not, all the protection afforded by the Act should be theirs. The attitude of the employers at the present juncture must not be taken as an implication that they are satisfied with the Act. What they rightly maintain is that if they are bound by'the preference provision, they should be given all the security against dislocation of trade that the Statute offers.