AGRICULTURAL WORKERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 June 1938, Page 9

AGRICULTURAL WORKERS

GENEVA FAVOURS REGULATION OF HOURS. MANY PROBLEMS INVOLVED. The Permanent Agriculture Committee of the International Labour Office, at its first meeting held in Geneva, went on record as definitely favouring the regulation of working hours of agricultural wage-earners. However, the committee, comprised of 42 experts from 25 countries, and representing employers and workers as well as governments and international organisations, decided that further study of this question is necessary before it can usefully be placed on the agenda of an international labour conference. To this end it requested the governing body of the International Labour Office to instruct the office “to continue its studies of the question with a view to its being placed on the agenda of one of the very next sessions of the conference after it has been re-submitted to the Permanent Agricultural Committee in 1939.” Mr William Holmes, Secretary-gen-eral of the British National Union of Agricultural Workers, explained the position .of British land workers as regards hours of work. The time problem, he said, is regulated by means of collective agreements on the basis of a 48-hour working . week; while wages are regulated in the same way. As a matter of fact, he said, some 60 per cent, of British agricultural workers have a 48-hour week in winter and a 50-hour week in summer. But he recognised that it was impossible to lay down similar regulations for all countries.

Mi’ A. H. Carell, director of the Central Union of Swedish Agricultural Employers, discussed Swedish legislation on hours of work in agriculture, which, he said, provides a total of 2600 hours per year with a possible extension of 260 further hours. One difficulty with the Swedish law, he declared, was that it pre-supposed each land worker was solely occupied either with cultivation or with cattletending; whereas, in practice, the same worker was occupied with both forms pf labour. This showed the necessity for not having regulations that were too strict. The problem of “real” hours of work, he said, was also a thorny one in Sweden. For example, he explained it had been estimated that only 70 per cent of the time worked by land workers was “real” work. He held that there was “too great a tendency,” when referring to agriculture, to think only of cultivation, though there existed other problems such as stock-raising, breeding, etc., which should not be forgotten.

Mr Lowry Nelson, professor of rural sociology at the University of Minnesota, the United States representative, said that so far as his country was concerned limitation of hours of work in agriculture was not an object that could be realised in the very near ■future. “But 'I want to say this on behalf of my country,” he added. “I feel that it would be of great value to us if this committee would establish the principle of limitation of hours of work in agriculture. I realise that there are many problems involved in the various countries in achieving a uniform work day, but nevertheless that should not deter us from setting up in principle that ideal.”

Mr Manuel Mesa, Mexican representative, and a member of the governing body of the National Agricultural Credit Bank of Mexico, told the committee that the diversity of agricultural methods in the different countries was “no irrefutable argument” against regulating hours of work in agriculture. Such diversity, he pointed out, exists as well in industry, but there is hardly a country in which industrial hours of work have not been made subject to regulation in one form or another. For this reason, he argued, it is just as possible to establish international regulations for agriculture, though such regulations should be made sufficiently flexible to take account of conditions imposed by weather and Nature.