‘Employers biggest law-breakers’

Press, 17 November 1981, Page 29

‘Employers biggest law-breakers’

PA Wellington Employers, • not trade unions, were the biggest industrial law-breakers in New Zealand, the Public Service Association’s president, Mr D. H. Thorp, has said. Accusations by the executive director of the Employers’ Federation, Mr J. W. Rowe, that many unions did not hesitate to break industrial or criminal law should be contrasted with the record of employers as documented in the annual report of the Labour Department, Mr Thorp said.

Mr Rowe’s attack on unions at the Employers’ Federation annual meeting on Tuesday had seen him “sink to an all-time low.” “In his own destructive way he accused unions of law-breaking when his own members are guilty every * year of thousands of ■ breaches of laws relating to safety, health, working conditions, and minimum pay rates for workers," Mr Thorp said. This year’s Labour Department annual report showed that 29 workers had been

killed, either in factories through machinery accidents, or on construction sites. The Factories Act had been broken 29,694 times; the Machinery Act, 19,507 times; and the Construction Act, 17,238 times. The report showed that employers were breaking or ignoring laws established to protect the safety and health of their staff. They were also underpaying them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, Mr Thorp, said. Last year, $1,170,377 arrears of wages had to be paid by employers at the instigation of Labour Department inspectors. “When is Mr Rowe going to make a speech urging employers to obey the law?” said Mr Thorp. “The facts are unarguable. It is not unions which break the law on a big scale, it is employers. . . I challenge Mr Rowe to deny his members’ shocking record.”