INDUSTRIAL LAWS

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 170, 6 April 1923, Page 7

INDUSTRIAL LAWS

BASIC WAGE SYSTEM AN AUSTRALIAN VIEW To an audience of members of the Business Men’s Forum in Sydney, Mr. A. B. Piddington,. K.C., lectured on “Industrial Law in its . Relation to Business and Family Life" (reports the “Sydney Morning Herald’’). “In every generation," said Mr. Piddington, “the history, of the law shows • that that generation has . its own particular task in spreading wider and wider the region over which tho law holds sway, dispossessing by that advance tho forces of brutality and substituting the reign of law. “Wo hear much of anarcjiy, revolution, and the possibility of a return to complete individual freedom. The. true anarchist in Australia is any member of the Single Purpose League when he sees a statute representative of tho thoughts and opinions of the people and savs he wants to abolish it. To oppose industrial arbitration is to advance .the cause of anarchy. There is necessity for some law to stand between Hie profitmakers who wish to make as much as possible out of tho workers without regard to justice and . the freebooters among the employees’ camp who wish to secure the greatest possible segment of the fruits of industry. There must te a controlling power, over both. “When last I spoke to Sir Samuel Griffith,” continued Mr. Piddington, “the question of the economic position of Australia came up. He voiced tho opinion that the keyword of the future as to the relation between employer and employee was to be not mastery but brotherhood. The lecturer quoted Sir Samuel’s words: If capital does not wake up soon it will bo too late,” and pointed out that that was the deliberate opinion of a man who for many years had been removed from the fever of party opinion. Parallel with Sir Samuel Griffith s utterance was that of. a pre-eminent young Australian capitalist who said: “The capitalist -has too much power if there is not some'kind of moderation in tho of it capital, will become so fat that it will burst. No one believed, urged, the lecturer, that a- physical revolution had any nrospect of success in Australia, but there might te very serious disaster and interruption to the continuity or their work by reason of the widespread dissatisfaction with the present socia to the question of a basic wage, the lecturer said that the new doctrine of a living wage first, came into discussion in 1907, when it was crystallised bv Mr. Justice Higgins in the Harvester case. There was, he thought, only one definition of reasonable remuneration—and that wa« “sumi as to enable the worker and his family to live as civilised human beings ,in the community.’’ That new doctrine included children, and therefore it sounded the death-knell of what may be called the “flat rate” • system, by whic’i the employee got the least that he would consent to take and the employer pave tho least” that ho could give.' But under the present basic wage ' system the unit was ■ a family composed of a man and wife and three children (two in New South Males). For the employers it might le said that they wore asked to pay for tho maintenance of a million workers families— ttet is to say, 3,000,000 children altopeflier. But nt present there are only about 800,000 children in Australia. Therefore, employers are really paving for the maintenance of 2,200,000 mythical children, who, like the cherubs, in a Correggio painting, were oil up in the clouds. Nevertheless, argped Mr. Piddington, he did not recommend different wages for married and single men. Single men should save in oiocr to prepare for marriage, and in the meantime they had boardinghousekeepers and landladies to pay. There was at present in Australia, ho said, no such thing as a reasonable basic wage. Everybody knew that £3 18s., for instance, in New South Wales could never pay for the reasonable requirements of a man, a wife, and two children. And as for the rent, as computed in the basic wage, he bad yet to meet anyone who believed that a iourroonuyl separate residence could be maintained on £3 18s. . Mr. Piddington earnestly advocated as the solution of the basic wage problem, Hie adoption of the French system of employers’ pools, to which the contributions were based on .the living needs of a man and wife, with separate endowment for mothers. “What we need to-day,’’ he raid, in conclusion, “is to recognise the permanent* value of human life. If you conceive of a. day* when every worker can- have a Torrens title to an assured F ("ndar_d of material comfort in his hn’”o. 1 believe that tho denunciations of the dnrg and of go-slow would become unnecessary. Energise the human will of tho worker by doing,him justice and providing him and his family with the assured moans of subsistence, and you will have organised human life so that wo, and not some people in a distant land, will be tho victor nation of tho future.”