SMALL FARMERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 269, 12 November 1937, Page 11

SMALL FARMERS.

CITATION OF EMPLOYEES. CO-OPERATIVE SHEARING. (By Telegraph.—Parliamentary Beporter.) WELLINGTON, Thursday. A claim that the clause in the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Amendment Bill dealing with the citation of employers as parties to Conciliation or Arbitration Court proceedings would detrimentally affect small farmers was made in the House of Representatives to-day by Mr. A. C. A. Sexton (Independent, Franklin). The legislation, he said, would bring the dairy farmer with a email flock of sheep directly under the Arbitration Court. Mr. Sexton explained that at the present time these small farmers were not cited, and in consequence were not bound by the shearing award, but under the proposed clause they would be bound in the future. Farmers in the Auckland and Waikato districts were reducing the size' of their herds on account of the difficulty in obtaining farm labour and replacing them with small flocks of breeding ewes. Them farmers would find that they were aubject to all the terms of the shearers' award. He would also like to know what was to be the position of email farmers who did their shearing on a co-operative basis. Would a neighbour who assisted in the shearing have to join the New Zealand Workers Union, he asked, and would the same apply to a farm hand who assisted with the crutching of a small flock ? He suggested that as many farmers would be affected, men with flocks of not more than 600 or 700 ewes should be exempted.