WAGES RESTORED, BUT WORK CUT

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

WAGES RESTORED, BUT WORK CUT

The deadening effect on business enterprise of the Government’s industrial legislation will not be reduced by the wages-restoration clauses of the Finance Bill, the second reading debate upon which is to be resumed in the House of Representatives to-morrow, lhe declared intention of the Bill is to provide “as nearly as may be” for the restoration of the rates of wages which were in force immediately before the reduction order of 1931. It was never intended that the reductions then made should be permanent, and the return of prosperity would have brought a return to the former wage level no matter what Government had been in power. But this Government is going a long way further. “If you raise the rate of wages to the 1931 level, why not raise them a bit higher?” asked Mr. Hamilton on Friday; whereupon Mr. Christie, from the Government benches, replied, “That is a reasonable level to which to raise them at the present time.” Did he realise that wages as an item of costs are about to be raised much higher? The restoration to be made by the Finance Bill will operate from July 1. The forty-hour week or its court-awarded substitute (also, as a rule, a reduction from the present week) is to operate from September 1, and one of the conditions attaching to it is that “the ordinary rate of weekly wages . . . shall not be reduced by reason of the reduction made in the number of . . . working hours.” Presumably this means the wages received on August 31, which will be the 1931 rates—the “reasonable level.” If so, employers may be required to pay ten per cent, more for forty hours of service in the first week of September than they paid for forty-eight hours of service in the last week of June. On the same output, this combination will represent a new charge on industry of between twenty-five and thirty per cent.