EIGHT-HOUR PAY

Evening Star, Issue 20029, 21 November 1928, Page 7

EIGHT-HOUR PAY

WASHINGTON CONVENTION BRITISH GOVERNMENT’S ATTITUDE (British Official Wireless.) Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright. RUGBY, November 21. (Received November 21, at noon.) The Earl of Lytton, in the House of Lords, raised the question of the Washington Eight-hour Convention, and moved that the Government should inform the International Labour Office at Genova of the precise points on which it desired a revision of the convention.

Lord Londonderry (on behalf of the Government) said this country was bound to maintain and promote the! .application of the general principle of an eight-hour day or a forty-eight-hour week so far as our special circumstances permitted, because that was part of our understanding in the Treaty of Versailles. The text of the Convention, however, was found to be veiled and ambiguous, and it failed to provide the necessary guarantee for uniformity of practice alter ratification, and made no allowance for various indsutrial practices perfectly consistent with its main purposes. The British Government was impressed by the fact that the interpretations given to various articles of the Convention by different countries were widely divergent. Neither the present Conservative Government ox this country nor the Labour Government could ratify a convention eo inapplicable in its present shape to our particular circumstances and containing such ambiguities. Wo had no desire to oppose tho principle of eight hours. Wo desired only to render the Convention an instrument under which uniformity of practice and enforcement would ho assured by removing ambiguities and making provision for various industrial practices which wore not in any way opposed to tho principlp of the Convention,