New Stabilisation Regulations

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25735, 22 February 1949, Page 4

New Stabilisation Regulations

When it became known that the Government intended to gazette amendments to the Economic Stabilisation Emergency Regulations, those sections of organised labour which have been competing with each other in setting up ambitious wage claims were very happy. Among those that have pleased themselves with jargon about the “ national dividend ” the celebration of the coming event was particularly jubilant. It will now be discovered to have been premature. The amendments reported this morning show no economic aberrations and are, in fact, quite unexceptionable. There is no reason why the Arbitration Court should not be specifically directed, as it now is, to consider “ relative move- “ ments in the incomes of different “ sections of the community ” before making either a new pronouncement fixing standard rates or a general order increasing wage rates: and there are good reasons why it should do so—as, indeed, it was authorised to do in the previous general direction to consider whatever factors, unspecified, it held to be relevant. One of these reasons worth special mention. The danger fluctuates, in New Zealand, of a marked and economically disabling disparity between rural and urban wage standards as one. though not the only, comparative measure of rural and urban standards of living. The new and explicit direction to the Court is bound to keep this issue constantly before it. It hardly needs to be said that the troubles of the Court will be increased; and troubles may not be confined to the Court. But this is an issue better faced squarely than obliquely, and the new regulations do face it. This illustrates in only one way the central fact that the regulations do not, as the willing carvers of the “ national “ dividend ” seemed to expect,

direct the Court to. convert profits lavishly into wages but direct it to consider the just relation of income levels. That is fair enough; and the Court may be expected to do it competently and fairly. Its difficulties are not lessened, however, by the fact that it has already to reconcile the income-regulating decisions of several other bodies and will soon have to reckon with those of another. Before very long the anomalies of thi situation will probably enforce a new legislative attack on the whole problem of wage policy. ......