ANNUAL REPORT DISCUSSED

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26092, 20 April 1950, Page 4

ANNUAL REPORT DISCUSSED

MORNING SESSION OF FEDERATION AUSTRALIAN DELEGATE HEARD (New Zealand Press Association.) WELLINGTON, April 19. An official report says that the annual conference of the New Zealand Federation of Labour in its morning session to-day considered the annual report and heard an address by the delegate of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (Mr R. R. Broadby). Mr A. B. Grant, secretary of the Canterbury Trades Council, referring to. a clause asking that majority decisions be accepted and acted on, said that no one could tell him that the national executive had acted on the decision of the last conference when it recognised the new Auckland carpenters’ union. To abide by majority decisions should be obligatory for both unions and the national executive, added Mr Grant. Mr H. F. Callagher (Auckland Trades Council) said that when his council had seen the hopeless position into which the old carpenters’ union had got itself it had urged members to join and gain control of the new union. Mr J. Cook (Canterbury Flourmillers’ Union), in referring to the advisability of retaining representation on various committees such as immigration, and rehabilitation, now that there had been a change of Government, said that trade unions were given an opportunity to explain the facts about the trade union movement in New Zealand to new immigrants. Mr K. McL. Baxter, secretary of the federation, said that there were people trying to flood the country with immigrants to defeat the workers’ right to the highest standard of living. To get off the committees was to abandon the camp, said Mr Baxter. The representatives should stay on until they were thrown off. The Australian delegate, Mr Broadby, in reviewing Australian trade union conditions and disputes, L said that the Australian Council of Trade Unions had adopted a rule that a union embarking on its own course had to accept responsibility for its own acts. He said that the Australian trade union movement conceded better conditions to only one country in the world—New Zealand. New Zealand’s conditions, he said, had been obtained through consistent support of the Labour Government.