Wage-fixing agreement criticised

Press, 8 September 1984, Page 3

Wage-fixing agreement criticised

By

OLIVER. RIDDELL

in Wellington

Agreement _ between the Government, the employers, and the unions on a system of wage fixing has been criticised by the former Minister of Labour, Mr J. B. Bolger. The agreement reached earlier this week sticks closely to the format of earlier national wage rounds. The main difference is that before each round the three parties will get together and talk about what size of wage increase the economy can afford. Mr Bolger said the agreement had been reached only because the Government had “put the difficult questions in the 'too-hard’ basket” ' / As a result, the agreement failed to address the important question of re-

form of union structures to allow industry and/or enterprise bargaining. There had been a lot of talk in recent weeks of the. need to address realistically the difficult questions facing New Zealand, Mr Bolger said. “Now here, in a key area, the Government has backed away from the important, questions of changing the law to permit different forms of bargaining units," he said. Before the change of Government, Mr Bolger had openly supported site or enterprise unions while the union representatives were against it The new Minister -of Labour, Mr Rodger, has said he favours modifying the union structure, but would favour extensive amalgamations rather than just setting up site or enterprise unions.