DOMESTIC SERVANTS
Industrial Rights Not Overlooked
LEGISLATION IN PROSPECT
Domestic servants have not been forgotten by the Government in the provisions that have been made for better conditions for workers. This was made clear by the Minister of Labour, Hop. H. T. Armstrong, in an interview yesterday when asked to comment on a Christchurch report that domestic servants there believed that special legislation would be brought down by the Government to cover their situation.
“It is true,” said Mr. Armstrong, “that domestic servants and many other classes of workers were exempted from the legislation when it was decided to delete from the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Amendment Bill the clause dealing with workers who were not employed for pecuniary gain. I talked the matter over with the Government at the time, and it was suggested that the clause should be dropped then. But it was agreed that provision would have to be made In some other Act to safeguard the working conditions and the wages of domestic servants and other employees who were eliminated in the meantime. “I am not in a position to say what form this legislation will take,” said the Minister, “but I have been discussing it for some time with m.v colleagues and with officers of the Department of Labour. Incidentally, there never has been anything in the law of the country to prevent domestic servants from forming unions. But. probably if they had formed unions and applied for awards the fact that they were not employed for the pecuniary gain of employers would have ruled them out.
“For certain reasons, however, it has not been considered advisable, in the meantime, to bring domestic servants and others into the scope of the legislation. But I can say that it would no doubt be to the decided advantage of the domestic servants to form a union and it would even be more helpful to the Government than otherwise for them to do so. We do not intend to discourage them in doing that.”
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/DOM19360619.2.67
Bibliographic details
Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 225, 19 June 1936, Page 10
Word Count
336DOMESTIC SERVANTS Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 225, 19 June 1936, Page 10
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