MINERS AND COAL OWNERS

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 247, 13 July 1921, Page 9

MINERS AND COAL OWNERS

HOPES OF PRIVATE CONFERENCES STATEMENT BY MR. BISHOP The Coal Mine Owners’ Association still hopes that the miners’ unions will mee£ its representatives in the various districts. and that as the result an amicable and satisfactory settlement of the mining dispute will lie arrived at, and local agreements framed to take the place of tho expired national agreement. As the Miners’ Federation has announced its intention of ignoring the Arbitration Court, it is probable that if tho dispute goes to the conciliation councils, none of the unions will appoint assessors. If the union does not appoint assessors the conciliation commissioner may appoint them: but the outcome will bo a report to the Court that no settlement has bean reached. The case will then bo before the Court, which will make or refuse an award as it thinks fit.

Although the miners apparently do nut intend to have any dealings with ..Mio Court, the registration of their unions under tho Arbitration Act is purely voluntart. There is no indication that the unions propose to cancel their registration, and probably they could not do so just now if they wished, as the filing of tho dispute by the employers has been effected prior to tho making of any application for cancellation. Mr. Bishop, acting-secretary of the Coal Mine Owners' Association, yesterday made tho following statement to a Dominion representative “The agreements under which work has been carried on at the various mines hav. ing expired, it is necessary that new ones shall be entered into, and tho mining companies have availed themselves of tho method provided by tho law of the land and filed their proposals for new agreements with the Clerk of Awards in each industrial district In these proposals an attempt is made to remove certain anomalies which existed in the last agreements at several of the mines, but the rates of wages and tonnage rates remain, as at present, 60 per cent, and 50 per cent, respectively, higher than pre-war rates.

“Immediately after the projxisals were filed the owners issued invitations to the unions to meet them and discuss the situation, with the object of arriving at an amicable and satisfactory settlement, and they hope that these negotiations will shortly be entered into, and that the results will be satisfactory. If, for any reason, these negotiations should unfortunately fail to reach a satisfactory conclusion. then the applications now filed bv the'owners under the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act will be proceeded with.

“Personally, I cannot see why the miners* unions should refuse to meet the owners in the first place, as they have been invited to do, nor why, in the event of their not agreeing on certain points, thev should object to those points being settled by a conciliation council or the Court of Arbitration. Any one who devotes a little time to an examination of labour records of the last few years must soon be convinced that the workers under Arbitration Court awards have been better off than the direct actiontsts. because while the latter have, in some instances, obtained slight concessions by force, these apparent gains have been more than off set by the loss of time and wages resulting from the direct action methods such as “going-slow,” stop-work meetings, and petty strikes. I have been trying to satisfy my own curiosity regarding this matter recently, and amongst other things I have found that tho miners during last year paid £'40,000 for their potty strikes, stop-work meet, ings nnd go-slow. That is their own business, of course, but it does seem an expensive amusement, especially when one considers that they reduced their average earnings by another 20 per cent., or £BO per man, by working short time. A little spirit of friendly co-operation with the management of the mines and abstention, from expensive direct action methods would prove of very real benefit to the mine workers, and the owners hope that in this spirit their men will meet them for the purpose of making now agreements."