F.O.L. ‘runs risk of becoming irrelevant’

Press, 7 May 1983, Page 8

F.O.L. ‘runs risk of becoming irrelevant’

PA Wellington The Federation of Labour would be wise to accept the Government’s offer of tax relief for low-income earners and further wage talks after the Budget, the Minister of Labour, Mr Bolger, said last evening. la an address to the Contractors’ Federation, Mr Bolger said neither the Government nor the ordinary New Zealander would be intimidated by threats. “The F.0.L., by deciding to follow this course, runs the risk of becoming irrelevant and being by-passed by thinking New Zealanders including its own members,” Mr Bolger said. It was not possible for the Government to accept the F.O.L.’s demands this week for an immediate wage increase, removal of the wage freeze, and a return to free wage-bargaining, he said. “To have accepted them would have meant abandoning all that had been achieved on the wage-price freeze and restarting the inflationary spiral once more,” he said. “The Government’s latest offer to the F.O.L. was for the F.O.L. to co-operate with the Government in targeting further tax relief for the tow-inctane group,” Mr Bolger said. This would be done in this year’s Budget and then the

parties could discuss again the question of the transition out of the freeze. “Unfortunately that proposition was rejected by the F.O.L. conference but it is still on the table and the unions would be wise to accept the offer,” he said. The recent index of real disposable incomes showed clearly that the average full-time wage and salary earner was slightly better off, taking into account last year’s tax cuts, in March this year compared with March, 1982, Mr Bolger said. “It is for that reason that we have offered to target further assistance at the low end of the income scale,” he said. The Opposition spokesman on labour, Mr E. E. Isbey,. has criticised the Prime Minister, Mr Muldoon, for not doing “everything possible” to keep the tripartite wage talks going. Mr Muldoon’s approach had been “completely negative and disruptive,”; he said. “The resolution moved by the Federation of Labour is a responsible one in that it is asking each union to express its discontent at the situation by using ‘the best methods suitable to meet their specific, circumstances’,” Mr Isbey said, “The difference between disposable incomes and

price increases leaves wage and salary earners a 12.2 per cent deficit in all wage and salary incomes. “The F.O.L. claim is more socially just than an across-the-board 2 per cent increase offered by the Prime Minister which gives far more to the higher-income earner than to those on the bottom of the scale,” Mr Isbey said. “I believe that the F.O.L. and its leadership have a wealth of experience in industrial activity. I have no doubt that they will monitor the responses of a completely negative and disruptive approach by the Prime Minister very carefully. “I join with (the Labour leader) David Lange’s call upon the Prime Minister to accept the responsibility for bringing some enduring industrial harmony to this country rather than shutting the door to responsible representatives of the trade union movement,” Mr said. Mr A. G. Williams, president of the New Zealand Chambers of Commerce, said that confrontation between the Government and the unions would only further divide New Zealand. “If raw confrontation is the best solution which leaders Of trade unions and Government can think of to solve the problems of the wage-price freeze, we are indeed lost,” he said.