Grey River Argus TUESDAY, March 15th, 1932. ARBITRATION OR STRIFE?

Grey River Argus, 15 March 1932, Page 4

Grey River Argus TUESDAY, March 15th, 1932. ARBITRATION OR STRIFE?

11 is doubtful if a peaceable industrial result is expected by those whose dictate the Government has obeyed in proposing the virtual abolition of arbitration. The Bill is no new idea. It has been cut and dried for years. As Hr Holland said last night in the House, the employing class have waited for their opportunity to day, just as their predecessors of the early ’nineties, and those of the year before the war waited, ready to gain their end by direct action when they judged the occasion to have arisen. The Government spokesmen are using to support the Bill arguments manufactured by the Employers’ Federation, and the spokesmen of the big squatters in particular are stumped at this juncture for an answer to the charge that they forced the issue forward three years ago at the National Industrial Conference. Hence the existing situation cannot be claimed to be the real justification or origin of the measure at all; The thing is all of a piece with the whole policy of the Coalition in plundering the most defenceless and hard up sections of the community in the alleged conviction that this is the only way to sustain and uplift the owning classes. We can concede that the latter have reason for the expectation that they will benefit by fresh wage cuts, increased, wages tax, abolition of social services, relief from property taxation, worsening of industrial conditions, lengthening of the hours of labour, and the destruction of workers’ rights and safeguards in all directions. But we deny that the great bulk of New Zealanders are going to benefit thereby. The idea of equality of sacrifice is not the inspiration of any of the legislation so far envisaged this session. The sacrifices imposed or proposed are so lop-sided as to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that the politicians through whom they are to be given effect regard the working class from a standpoint entirely different to that in which they regard the owning and employing class. The welfare of the majority is not taken to be the.

welfare of the country, hut the country is reckoned to be the servant of the minority. For instance labour of hand and brain is being universally cheapened by Ihe Government. At the same time the product is subject to no such arbitrary regulation or reduction in value. So far as the exploitation of the consumer, like that of the mere worker, may go, the sky is the limit in the estimation of the Government. A very simple question that will shed light on the situation may be put. It is this.: If the dole wage basis on all public works, the further lowering of remuneration for labour in all other directions, and exactions generally proposed have the effect which the Govern-

ment claims to be its object, how will the result leave the community? The rich will have been put in the way of becoming richer than ever before, even if they should be relatively fewer than before, whereas the remainder of the population must be left relatively poorer than before, if not also proportionately a greater part of the community. If production costs are forced down so that the labour factor is at the barest subsistence level, the monopolists of land .and of the various forms of capital must reap the reward of a richer surplus than ever before. The advent of slavery on works in the nature of public enterprises must have as its counterpart similar conditions on works in the nature of private enterprise. State economy is said to necessitate the one —and private economy is declared to call for the other. The Arbitration Act may, under the amending measure, be held to apply no longer to any specified class or classes of persons engaged in industry, or they may be partially exempted, so that awards and agreements may soon be no more than scraps of paper. As for the vaunted compulsory conciliation, while the present law obliges employers and employees to enter conciliation conferences, the new proposal is to allow employers to render such proceedings futile simply by refusing to appoint any representatives to take part in them. The employer, it seems, can either prevent a Conciliation Council, or

prevent any reference of a dispute | to the Court if a Council should meet. Thereafter awards or agreements cease, at the end of a month, to have any force whatever, and the workers can be left to starve or submit to whatever terms an employer may choose to offer. The Court is empowered to assume that if a worker is paid less than the award or agreement rate in rural industry, he may have agreed thereto, and he thereby is deprived of any right to recover the difference between the award rate and the actual rate which unemployment, hunger, or dictation may induce him momentarily to toil for. There is no doubt the exigencies of State finance, real as they are, and the hardships of many farmers, no less real, are being made the excuse or the cover for wholesale exploitation of labour in every avenue of industrial, commercial and other -economic endeavour in this country. There are those who say that the administration is simply derelict in an economic blizzard and that the blind are leading the blind, but when the fabricators of this reactionary arbitration amendment are manifesting the consciousness that it has been planned long since, even by such -as some of them at the time politically opposed, the authors of the Bill cannot be acquitted of responsibility on the score of invincible ignorance, but must be held guilty when the consequences of their policy become presently more painfully evident even than they are at the moment.