WAGES & CLAIMS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 August 1939, Page 8

WAGES & CLAIMS

STATEMENTS BY MINISTERS CITED AGAINST WORKERS BY EMPLOYERS. PROTEST MADE BY LABOUR REPRESENTATIVE. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. A protest against statements by Ministers of the Crown being used by' employers’ assessors as argument against the workers at conciliation councils was made by Mr P. M. Butler when the conciliation council which considered the North Island Borough Councils' and other local bodies’ dispute was sitting yesterday. He said it was a remarkable thing that the employers’ main argument consisted in quoting Ministers of the Crown against the workers, though the Ministers had never said low wages should be established. It was unfair that statements made by Ministers months previously, on abstract matters, should be trotted out at a conciliation council.

“They quote these matters against us and the statements are not relevant to the matters in dispute and we take objection to it." said Mr Butler. *! think Ministers should be given an opportunity of objecting to it. Il is the only argument I have heard put up by the employers today about our ofier on wages, and it is a weak one." Mr D. I. McDonald, employers’ agent. said that statements by Ministers of the Crown regarding stabilisation were only a minor argument. He said the Arbitration Court had a policy regarding wage rates which were decided by Mr Justice O’Regan’s Court in September, 1937. in respect of hourly rates, followed some months later by a further indication of the Court’s mind on the question of weekly wages. Since those pronouncements. the Court had not shown, except in cases where it could be proved that there was justification for increasing particular rates, that in its opinion conditions were such as to justify increases in wage rates which had been brought up to the Court’s standard. Nothing was agreed to by the council. and he hoped they would meet under circumstances that would enable them to do what had been done in the past viz. reach a settlement. Mr Butler said the Court had no authority to send the dispute back to Ihe council. The Commissioner. Mr Ritchie, said the council had not been wholly a; waste of time. I