WAGES AND COSTS

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 106, 7 May 1938, Page 13

WAGES AND COSTS

REPLY TO MINISTER.

STATEMENT ISSUED.

COMMERCE CHAMBERS' ANSWER.

"The Minister of Industries and Commerce has made a statement in answer to our analysis of wage rates, living ;osts and purchasing power, but he makes no adequate reply," says a statement by the Associated Chambers of Commerce Df New Zealand. "Twitting us with having concern for the position of the worker, tabulating implications which he chooses to read into our article, and introducing a variety if new issues, is only avoiding the principal point we raised, namely, the effective value of increased wages (after allowing for the increased cost of living) as shown by the Government's own officially published index figures on that precise subject, with farm workers excluded," it continues. "The Minister says of us that 'by a clever selection of statistics and some calculations which they admit are only approximately correct, they endeavour to show that, in the case of industrial wbrkere, prices have risen nearly as much ae wages have been raised, so that the 'effective' wages of such workers are only very little improved.' "We selected no statistics other than the identical ones (wage rate, retail price and effective wage indexes) used bj the Minister himself in a statement h« made in the newspapers on March 29 1037, on the relationship between in creased prices and increased monej wages," says the statement. "Quotations show how firmly th< Minister, a year ago, relied on th< official index figures to decide the ques tion. Why does the Minister now sur prisingly abandon these figures, describ ing them as 'narrow' and 'restricted, and make quotations to show that, aftei all, they do not tell the hard facts ?" th( statement asks. "Is it because we hav< shown that, when farm workers arc excluded, the index figures establisl that those remaining industrial mah workers of the country who are in fulltime employment at award rates of pay have an effective wage advantage over 1935 of only approximately 0 per cent— increased living costs having all but cancelled increased wages? "The whole purpose of our original statement was to bring out the full facts of the case by a dispassionate analysis of the official indexes used last year by the Minieter himself, and we resent his suggestion that we were inspired and partisan, and that we misrepresented the official statistics," the statement concludes. "We did not advocate a reduction in wages from present levels, as he would have ue say. "Wβ pointed out that the policy of going on increasing wages (with its consequent loading of industry) had not given the great majority of industrial workers any effective advantage other than a passing one, owing to the more rapid increase in living cost*. With this we linked high taxation on companies, which we said was largely written into higher costs of living, and on that note we concluded. "Will the Minister take up that point, and will he eay that taxation ie not reducing the purchaeing power of money wages, an<3 that a reduction in taxes on business concerns would not reduce the cost oi living and would not give a greatei purchaeing power to existing wages?"