Evening Post. THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 1922. THE LIMIT

Evening Post, Volume CIII, Issue 139, 15 June 1922, Page 6

Evening Post. THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 1922. THE LIMIT

Even a worm will turn. Even the Arbitration Court, which has been the cockshy of the politician and the agitator ever since they brought it into being nearly thirty years ago, has its rights and its dignity, and, if not its close season, at any rate its code of rules,, written arid unwritten, which must set some limits to the enterprise of the unlicensed sportsmen who are never tired of " potting " at it. It was in an atmosphere of strife and suspicion that the Court first saw the light in 1895, and it has been breathing the same atmosphere ever since. The suspicion and the antagonism were at first on the side of the employers. Was not the Act which created the Court introduced by the first Liberal and Labour Government, drawn and put through by the first Minister of Labour, and designed, as was frankly proclaimed in its official title*. " to encourage the formation of industi'ial Unions and Associations " ? And had not the country already had more than enough of unions in the great strike which had paralysed industry in 1890? The fears of the employers were at first justified. The attention of Labour, which, by its defeat in the great strike, had been diverted to politics, was brought back to the union movement by the encouragement which the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894 held out. Unions were multiplied, grew in power and prestige, and kept the new Court busy with continuous demands for higher wages and improved conditions, which were as a rule granted in whole or in part.v

Conciliation went by the board in those happy days of prosperity and expanding industry. The litigious spirit was developed till it not only coloured and controlled the whole procedure on both sides, but even created scores of so-called "industrial disputes" of which nothing would have been heard if there had been no statutory encouragement. The cat-and-dog methods of the Conciliation Boards, which won for them the popular title of Irritation Boards, resulted in; their substantial supersession by the Arbitration Court as the tribunal of first jinstance. But Labour continued to rejoice because it was rarely sent empty, away. The inevitable change came, however; in due course. Our industries could not continue to expand indefinitely, and, after the Court had been a number of years at work, they received a check from conditions which affected the whole world. The change was very properly reflected in the awards of the Court. Labour no longer got all or nearly all that it wanted, and some-, times got nothing at all. Strikes, which the new system was suppbsed to have abolished, but which really had been suspended not by the Arbitration Court but by the good times which enabled it to give satisfaction to the workers, began to reappear. Bed Labour received a powerful stimulus from the spread of the idea that the Court which Labour had been praising to the skies for so many years was really "the tool of the Capitalist."

With the rapid rise of' prices as a result of the war, the importance of the Arbitration Court as a wagefixing tribunal was once more Strongly emphasised, and with the aid of the Government Statistician it was kept busy adjusting • wages and bonuses to fit the increased cost of living. Even so, Labour was not satisfied that the process was fast enough. Conversely, now that prices are falling, Labour recognises that the downward tendency of wages in industries governed by the Court is not as rapid as it would have been under the unchecked control of the employer and the market. Thus it is that, even with wages falling, militant Labour is taking a. spell in its denunciation of the Arbitration Court as a tool of the Capitalist. It is partly for the same reason that the criticisms and the protests of which the Court has been complaining have come from the other side.' It is rarely given to a Court to satisfy both sides, and the Arbitration Court is no exception to the rule. But its special trouble is that, whereas other Coiuts are mostly concerned with individual and passing quarrels which do not recur, decisions of the Arbitration Court represent in the main a series of interventions in a campaign between combatants who are permanently organised and never satisfied, and whose eager animosities are rarely interrupted, even by a. truce.

A Court which operates under these conditions must be chronically exposed to-the strife and the suspicion in which, as we have said, it was born. It must therefore accommodate itself to its special circumstances by patience, forbearance, and not too punctilious an insistence upon forms and ceremonies and the rigour of the game. This the Arbitration Court has consistently dene, towl. there i« «, limit beyond whioJb acquiescence wjuld

mean the loss not merely of dignity but of power and authority, and it has been brought to that limit by such communications as those which we published yesterday. The most striking of these is so good as to be worth reproducing. It was addressed to the Court by one of the parties cited:

I have received a copy of the threshing mill and chaffcutter employees' award, and notice you have my name included, and I order you to scratch my name off at once, as I will be a party to no such thing. I please myself who I employ and how I pay them, and, another thing, I'll have no union men on my place or union agents. I'll buy amill of my own or atop producing grain altogether before I'll be bothered with awards or unions and agitators going about getting men to stop work. I had the mill here idle for two days this year through the award. I notice the agitators are the first in for meals always.

If the Court had made •an example of the party who penned this protest nobody could have complained. But the bucolic simplicity with which the document combines the free and easy with the dictatorial is somewhat disarming, and may have inclined the Court to mercy. An example will, however, have to be made of somebody if this kind of thing continues. " This Court," said Mr. Justice Frazer, "in its jurisdiction is a Supreme Court, and is entitled to the same respect as the Supreme Court." Yet some of its rural litigants have been treating the Arbitration Court with far less respect than they might be expected to extend to their own J.P.'s.