The Press FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1965. Industrial Relations

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30900, 5 November 1965, Page 16

The Press FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1965. Industrial Relations

The important cause of good industrial relations cannot have been well served by the bitter attack on the Government, and particularly on the Minister of Labour (Mr Shand), by the president of the New Zealand Employers’ Federation, Mr J. D. Quirk. He presumably expressed some collective rather than merely his own personal opinion when he spoke of the Minister’s trying hard “to blow into life ” the embers of the fire of class warfare by persistently attacking, from “ political ” motives which Mr Quirk apparently did not specify, the attitude of employers and management. These are very grave charges indeed; and the wisdom of making them in public, without citing specific examples on which employers and employees and the public in general might form independent judgments, is very much open to question. Mr Quirk did not deny that employers were often at fault in industrial disputes: but he seemed to imply that their faults were usually trifling compared with those of their employees; and he came dangerously close to suggesting that the “ very *' occasional ” defiance of the law by employers and the more frequent instances of “ ignorance or error ” on their part should be overlooked. Broadly speaking, Mr Quirk was right in saying that a much more important cause of industrial upsets is the action of individual workers or groups of workers to evade or break the terms of agreements. What he does not seem to have acknowledged, or perhaps even perceived, is that these more serious infractions of the law by employees may be both provoked by and justified by the occasional faults of employers. The average working man is neither as well educated nor as well versed in the law as the average employer; and either is apt to lose his sense of proportion when nursing a grievance or smarting under injustice.

If Mr Shand has been “ tiresomely repetitious ” In reminding employers that they cannot afford to be wrong, he is doing no more than his duty. His duty, indeed, is to be strictly impartial as between employers and employees on the occasions, which should be rare, when the country’s quite elaborate machinery for conciliation and arbitration breaks down or seems in danger of breaking down. Mr Shand clearly does not wish to intervene in disputes unnecessarily, or perhaps as frequently as Mr Quirk would like. He has fairly defined his role in these terms: “ I believe that the Government should with- “ draw as far as possible and emphasise to employers “ and trade unions alike that it is their responsibility “ to carry out their own negotiations Only when a party to a dispute went to lengths which clearly threatened the national interest should the power of the Government be thrown into the scales, he said. If Mr Quirk was serious in inviting members of his federation to “ remember with resentment ” the decline in their relations with the Government, they should also be invited to exercise their memories over a rather longer term. They might then recall Ministers of Labour who were markedly less impartial —and who had far less successful records in maintaining industrial amity.