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Evening Star, Issue 21640, 8 February 1934, Page 13

The corporations will have advisory and legislative iunetions. They will exercise the former whenever a Ministerial Department calls on them for an opinion in any matter coming within their respective purview. The judicial function, on the other hand, can only be exercised in a very restricted held. They will act as a legislative authority in economic matters, when the interests which the corporation represents, acting trough 'their Federal organs and with the consent of the head of the Government, desire to dolor to it the task of regulating collective economic relations between several categories of producers. Finally, the corporation has a conciliatory function, when the parties to a Labour dispute agree to refer it to the corporation rather than to the Labour Court; in this case its award will have executive force. SMOOTHING OUT DISPARITIES. The powers thus assigned will enable the corporations to act on such questions as smoothing out wage disparities in a given occupation; regulating conditions of apprenticeship and vocational training by issuing and superrising the enforcement of general and binding rules; co-ordinating credit, welfare and Labour-exchange activities. The Government will deler to them many of the tasks hitherto assigned to special ad hoc commissions and committees They will also be the proper organs for negotiating interguild agreements as between guilds representing the sometimes contrasting interests of commerce, agriculture, and industry. It seems probable that corporations, at least in the initial period, will be set up only for those branches of production wiiose complex activities require particular attention for the discipline of economic relations. For instance, in one corporation there may be representatives •of the metallurgical and mechanical industries; in a corporation of building trades there may he represented the producers of cement and bricks, and the builders themselves namely, the consumers of cement and bricks. The settlement and discipline of these interests may therefore take place in the presence and with the direct participation of all those who contribute to the productive activity of those given , branches of modiiction. The formation of corporations is thus destined to be a further step towards that corporative discipline which must conciliate private initiative with the supreme interests of the nation. THE FINAL STEP. The corporations have yet another task—namely, to regulate the relations between the various corporations themselves. The corporations represent economic categories or groups; these economic categories are m turn, directly or indirectly, related to one another. Differences between the various categories may easily arise, and these are to he settled by means of intercorporative agreements. In one and the same branch of production, for instance, in industry, there may co-exist corporations, each of which will represent interests often in contrast with those represented by other corporations. The possibility of these contrasts appears oven greater in the ease oj corporations representing difierent groups, but having somewhat similar interests. Hence the need of harmonising the interests of the various corporations The formation of corporations com pletes the structure of the corporative State. The structure may ho compared to a pyramid; at the foot are the syndicates, and at the apex is the Minister of Corporations and president of the National Council of Corporations — Signor Mussolini.