STRUCK OUT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 96, 26 April 1933, Page 5

STRUCK OUT.

GROCERY DISPUTE PARTIES. COUNCIL QUESTIONS ACTION. (By Telegraph.—Press Association.) CHRISTCHURCH, Tuesday. The power of the conciliation commission to strike out parties to an application for hearing of an industrial dispute and to grant those parties: a separate hearing was discussed before a conciliation council yesterday, when C. J. Forbes and other employers in the grocery trade made application for a new agreement with the Grocers' Assistants' Union. The question arose when the commissioner, Mr. S. Ritchie, announced that at the request of the Canterbury Master Grocers' Union of Employers, representing nine, employers, he had struck those nine out of the general application of C. J. Forbes and others, and had appointed a separate day for the hearing of that case. The parties struck out were all grocers controlling big businesses, two of them being chain stores. Mr. D. I. Macdonald, appearing as agent for the Master Grocers' Union (the parties struck out), said there was no dispute in the terms of the Act. A citation had been isued by Forbes, but none of the principal applicants had been consulted. He maintained that the dispute was not a genuine one. Mr. Ritchie said the Act did not limit the number of industrial agreements that might exist in any one district at once, and it seemed to him that in natural justice other parties should be struck out from the present dispute and heard later. Mr. M. J. Riordan, assessor for the employers, said-that a clause in the Act under which the commissioner was using the power to strike out parties was intended only to allow the commissioner to strike out parties if they.were not engaged in the industry. Resolutions were carried by the council directing that the nine parties struck out be reinstated in the dispute, and that a case be stated to obtain the ruling of the Arbitration Court on the question of the commissioner's power to strike out parties.