COURT OR DIRECT ACTION

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 83, 9 April 1928, Page 8

COURT OR DIRECT ACTION

(To the Editor.) Sir, —According to your published report, Professor Murphy in hia address to the Industrial Conference said that "continual application to a Court to secure what direct action would secure if there were no Court," could be as well termed thinly disguised industrial war as industrial peace. Would the professor prefer to have the disguise torn off? Would he prefer industrial war to the Arbitration Court? If he does, then the surest way to obtain that object is to clip the Court of its wings and make it helpless. Who would like to see the thinly disguised diplomatic warfare between the nations substituted by its only alternative, another World War? Then why should we deliberately throw away the only means of preventing open industrial war? There was a time when disputes about land were settled by direct action; that is to say, by a battle between the retainers of the opposing claimants. Why don't we settle such disputes like that now any longer? Because it didn't pay. And if it didn't pay then, how is it going to pay us now iv industrial disputes? Did it pay the employers in 1819 to do away with the wages-fixing tribunal instituted in 1583? The employers, having got rid of this tribunal, proceeded to iix wages according to their own ideas, without any regard to what it cost the men to Jive. Tho result was a poor rate that, according to Walpole, during «a term of slump ran up to 30s in the pound, and many employers were ruined. Professor Murphy is all for the public interest. Would it be to the public interest to allow the employers to do the same thing here? And what is there to stop them from doing it here when arbitrition ceases to be compulsory, as tho professor says it should be? For the stronger side will always refuse to arbitrate when it can secure what it wants without it. The idea that the cost of living basis of wages is economically unsound is by no means a new discovery. Nineteen hundred years ago there were rich farmers who not only got their work done for less than it cost the labourers to live. The Apostle James says they had their fields "reaped for nought." Evidently they were practising what some of our economists are preaching to-day, and the Apostle pronounces Heaven's curse on them for so doing. If economic law had been strictly observed, would we have found ourselves caught in the economic labyrinth? We cannot get out now by sacrificing those who are in with us. We know the ww we got in, and that must also be the way; to get out, only we must ton round

and move in the opposite direction.. That means no more borrowing for unproductive work, a substantial reduction in imports, especially luxuries, and an equally substantial increase.in local manufactures. But I suppose that will be too hard.—l am, etc., H. C. THGMSEN.