NOT ENTERTAINED

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 266, 9 November 1935, Page 14

NOT ENTERTAINED

ARBITRATION SYSTEM.

POSITION IN ENGLAND. MR. BISHOP'S OBSERVATIONS. (From Our Own Correspondent.) NAPIER, Friday. In England there exists a fine system of collective bargaining and tho most obviously happy relationship between tho employers and workers, said Mr. T. O. Bishop, secretary of the New Zealand Employers' Federation, in speaking to the Hawke's Bay branch of the federation at Napier. Mr. Bishop recently returned from a visit to Geneva, where he represented New Zealand at the conference of the International Labour Organisation, and to England and the United States. England would not even entertain any suggestion of a system of compulsory arbitration, and that feeling was just as intense among the workers as it was among the employers, added Mr. Bfehop. The attitude of the workers was that what they could not get by their own efforts under the existing system of collective bargaining they would go without. They did not want the Government, they said, butting into their affairs. There was a limited application of the principle of compulsory agreement in respect of some 12 or 14 of the more poorly organised industries of the smaller kind. That system, however, was nothing at all like the system of compulsory arbitration, but a system of what was known as Board of Trade agreements. Mutual Respect and Trust. The relationship between the British employer and the British worker was just about the best thing in the industrial world to-day, and had brought into existence a spirit of mutual respect and trust. That spirit was growing, and would continue, and its growth augured well for the maintenance of increasingly cordial relationships between the employers and workers in the future. The conditions in some of the newer industries, such as rayon manufacture, were excellent, and among the workers in those industries there was much less unionism than there was in others. The employers had the modern idea of what was a fair thing for the worker, and therefore there was not the snme call for the existence of trades unions. In referring to his observations in the United States Mr. Bishop explained the intense antagonism of the American employer to the trade union movement. In many of tho larger American industries, he added, tho conditions for the workers were ideal, and it was the object of the employers to make the conditions so good that the workers would have no wish to establish trades unions. The explanation of the American employers' nttitude toward trades unions was that many unions were nothing more or lees than "racketeering" organisations run by men who were criminals and "racketeers" exploiting the workers and blackmailing the employers.