SATURDAY MORNING SHOPPING

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 264, 4 August 1936, Page 8

SATURDAY MORNING SHOPPING

The Arbitration Court has taken a broad and sensible view, of its responsibilities, and of the spirit of the legislation, in rejecting the applications of the several grocers’ assistants’ unions , for the closing of grocery shops on Saturday mornings. This decision niay be regarded as a precedent, so that Saturday morning shopping generally will continue as hitherto when the shorter working week comes into force on September 1. The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Amendment Act, under which the applications were brought, empowers the court to reduce the working hours fixed by a current award or agreement, and directs it to fix the maximum at forty hours unless it would be “impracticable” to carry on the industry efficiently if the working hours were so limited. In applications under this section which have come before it hitherto, the court has acknowledged two kinds of impracticability: one corresponding to physical impossibility, the other governed by the financial ability of the industry concerned to bear the additional cost of reduced hours—for the law specifically provides that although hours may be, the total weekly wages must not be reduced. A third factor, the convenience of the general public, is now introduced, in deference to which the court finds that “regard must be had to the real function and purpose” of an industry, and to “the service that it is called upon to give. The established customs and the daily needs of the general public are matters of great importance in the consideration of an application involving a general closing of shops.” The reason that grocery shops—and, by inference, all retail shops—are not to be closed on Saturday mornings does not spring, therefore, from the impossibility of closing, nor, in the main, from the inability of employers to bear the added cost of closing. It springs from the public interest, which the court very properly recognises and of which in arbitration proceedings it alone is custodian.