GOVT. AND INDUSTRY

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 April 1937, Page 7

GOVT. AND INDUSTRY

MR. HAMILTON'S CRITICISM

[PER PRESS ASSOCIATION.]

CHRISTCHURCH, April 16.

“I was Minister for Labour for four years, and I think I am right in saying that the Labour Government has had more industrial troubles and more losses of working days in the 16 months it has been in power than in those four years I was in office,” said the Leader of the Opposition (Hon. Adam Hamilton), in an address this evening, to supporters of the National Party. “It is very significant that the Labour Government is having more trouble in handling its own people than the previous Government had.” Mr. Hamilton said he was opposed to compulsory arbitration. Voluntary submission to arbitration was much preferable, and he believed that if a vote was taken among the industrial unions in the Dominion on the subject there would be a return to voluntary arbitration. “You may think 1 am wrong in saying that,” he added, “but I know what I aln talking about. 1 would not be surprised if the present Government feels it lias made a mistake in bringing back compulsory arbitration.”

Mr. Hamilton criticised the action taken by the Minister for Labour (Hon H. T. Armstrong) in intervening in the stay-in strike of abattoir workers near Auckland. The parties, he said, had agreed to accept the Arbitration Court’s judgment as final, and when the workers had expressed their disapproval of conditions the Minister had interfered. The Minister’s action, he commented, was “a. pretty serious thing,” and carried a suggestion of dictatorship. He could understand that the Minister had been in a difficult, position, but. he felt that the Minister should have abided by the law he had helped to create. A Minister of the Crown should be bound by the law as much as anybody else.