ARBITRATION COURT.

Auckland Star, Volume XXX, Issue 295, 13 December 1899, Page 2

ARBITRATION COURT.

GROCERS' ASSISTANTS OUTSIDE THE ACT.

(By Telegraph.—Press Association.)

CHRISTCHURCH, this day

The Arbitration Court has given judgment on the legal points argued iv the grocers' dispute. The employers had objected that grocers' assistants —not "being persons engaged in an industry within the meaning of the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act —could not register a$ an industrial union; that the certificate of registration was therefore null and void; that if the certificate was not null and void it did not confer upon the members of the union the right to have an award between them and the employers; and that the employers were retail grocers merely, and not engaged in manufacturing, or business of an industrial character within the meaning of the Act, and that therefore they were not subject to its provisions. The president said he did not think that according to the popular sense in which the words industrial matters wrere used they could be understood as including the trades of retail traders, and he did not think that the dispute between the grocers and their assistants would, in popular language, be referred to as an industrial dispute. He pointed out that shops were not 'named in section 27 of the Act, giving power of inspection, and said it was improbable that if it had been intended to bring shopkeepers and shops within the Act all'reference to shops would have been omitted from that section. In his opinion it had been made out in previous cases that the persons sought to be affected came within the jurisdiction of the Court. It was, however, Still Open to the union to move the Supreme Cotirt for a mandamus to the Arbitration Court to hear the dispute.