APPRENTICES' WAGES.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 208, 3 September 1929, Page 3

APPRENTICES' WAGES.

REDUCTION RIGHT SOUGHT. EMPLOYERS' CLAIM RESISTED. In the Arbitration Court to-day the Auckland Provincial Furniture and Furnishing Industrial Union of Employers sougth the deletion of clause 14 to provide that an employer should be entitled to make a rateable deduction from the wages of an apprentice for all time lost by him through sickness, accident not arising out of and in the course of the employment, default, voluntary absence with the consent ol the employer, or any. other cause over which the employer has 110 contfol. Mr. Wright said this .application was being made very generally in trades throughout New Zealand, and in view of this no immediate decision was asked for. The idea was that a standard clause should be adopted as a general order of the Court covering the right to make deductions./ Mr. Dixon, for the Employees' Union, said the proposal was strenuously opposed. by the organisation he represented. The employers were bound to a five-years' contract, and such a clause meant that apprentices would be placed practically 011 an hourly wage. The proposed clause gave employers altogether too much power, and deductions could be made on the flimsiest pretexts. Decision was deferred pending the hearing of applications in other districts.