Wages and Industries.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18970, 7 April 1927, Page 8

Wages and Industries.

Tho Bulletin on wages and wage-earn-ers which was issued yesterday by the Economics Committee of the Chamber of Commerce ended on a note which has been frequently heard of late. The point was made that "it is diffi"cuJt to see how the unsheltered industries, receiving prices only about " 40 per cent, above pre-war level for "their products, can afford to buy "at present prices their usual quanti- " ties of goods produced by the shel-

" tered industries," and it was added that the question raised "large and "important issues," one of which was " the soundness or unsoundness of our " present arbitration procedure." From the early days of the Arbitration Act it has often enough been said that the real test of the usefulness of the Act would come when the country encountered a spell of economic depression. For various reasons the Dominion has enjoyed a wonderful spell of prosperity for the past thirty years, broken only twice before to-day, and then only for short periods which ended before people had begun anxiously to question the effect of the Act. The Bulletin contains data showing very clearly the inequitable working of the tariff and wage arbitration systems of this country, although the authors have postponed a definite pronouncement until their next two Bulletins. The first part of the current Bulletin, dealing with the distribution of the people by occupations, shows that nearly a third get their living from primary production. The actual wages paid to country workers have not risen by so much as the wages paid to the urban workers, but the farmers are loaded with the high prices for all commodities resulting from the tariff and the wage-raising Act working in conjunction. Nor can they, being unable to control the prices the world will pay for the produce they export, pass on the cost of production as others can. We thus see the monstrous manner in which the dice have been loaded against the farmer. His increased production costs mean that ha is contributing towards a tariff that enables the sheltered producer to pay a wage that has no real relation to the efficiency of his industry. For the farmer, selling most of his produce abroad, there is no prospect of passing on his increased working ctets. This mjikos it impossible for him to" pay high wages, and a result is a drift to the towns, which, as the Bulletin suggests, is a cause of the present unemployment problem. The remedy for this perilously lopsided development of o*v _ industrial system i 3 obvioua and simple, but wo are for the present compelled to listen to Cabinet

Ministers talking about the inevitability of seasonal unemployment and to submit to the spectacle of a Tariff Commission gravely collecting data about infants' food and pneumatic tyres.