The Dominion. MONDAY, JULY 27, 1936. APPRENTICES AND THE BASIC WAGE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 257, 27 July 1936, Page 8

The Dominion. MONDAY, JULY 27, 1936. APPRENTICES AND THE BASIC WAGE

A point of public uncertainty to which Parliament ought to give early attention is raised by leading Wellington secondary schoolmasters in a news article printed on this page this morning. Some parents are alarmed lest one result of the new industrial legislation should be to penalise the boy who, although he hopes to take up a trade, has been kept at school after his sixteenth year. The difficulty is about apprenticeship, the normal period of which is five years, so that a boy apprenticed later than sixteen does not “come out of his time” until after he is twenty-one. Shortly it will be an offence to employ any worker who is twenty-one, or older, without paying him at least the basic wage; and parents recognise that no employer can be expected to pay to an apprentice a wage which is to be fixed at a level sufficient to maintain a man, his wife and three children “in a fair and reasonable standard of comfort.” It is felt, accordingly, that employers will not engage apprentices older than sixteen. Yet as the headmaster of Wellington College points out, the trend of modern educational thought is toward keeping boys longer at school, not pushing them out. Most employers prefer to take apprentices not later than in their sixteenth year in any case; but a kindly anxiety to do something for the generation which missed its start in the depression has lately led some of them to waive this requirement, especially when a boy's parents have kept him at school —doubtless stinting themselves to do it, in the fond hope that they were helping him. And so they were. Members of the Government, and especially the Minister of Education, will be among the first to admit this. Therefore the Government should at once take steps to banish the fears which apparently are haunting the minds of some mothers and fathers. The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Amendment Act provides for the issue of permits to accept wages lower than the basic rate, and it may be competent for the Arbitration Court, in making its general order enforcing the basic wage, to exempt apprentices. Much better to make their position clear by some such general reference than to demand individual application in cases where young men at twenty-one are still in their apprenticeship. If the court cannot grant general exemption under the law as it stands, then Parliament will have to amend the law. The longer children can be kept at school, the greater their worth to the nation; and the nation cannot afford to let parents think otherwise, even mistakenly.