No Evidence for Employers on Bank Clerks’ Claims

Grey River Argus, 24 February 1949, Page 6

No Evidence for Employers on Bank Clerks’ Claims

WELLINGTON, Feb. 23

Mr W. J. Mountjoy, advocate for the Associated Banks, when the hearing of the New Zealand bank officers’ dispute was resumed in the Arbitration Court to-day said; ‘‘lf all the statements made by the witnesses produced in this court were taken without cross-examination and questioning, a very weird and incorrect picture of a bank officers’ life would be accepted.” He said a witness had made damaging statements about the entries in the attendance book at his bank. However, on being asked to give specific instances oi falsification oi these entries, he had admitted that his own hours had not been tampered with. Another witness had conended that he had made false entries in the attendance book, because he did not want to disclose that he could not do his work in the ordinary aany nours. It his actual hour had been shown, it might have retarded his progress in the bank’s service. Mr Mountjoy claimed that there had been no proof whatever of any occasion on which a bank officer had suffered unfair treatment because of an unfavourable report, nor had any proof been given of the union’s allegations that bank officials endured a life of drudgery. He submitted that bank officers had of late years had their work simplified by the introduction of machines, which had replaced the need for a great deal of concentrated work.

Referring to a statement by the union, that bank workers had been “literally trapped into what must inevitably be to them a merely routine existence,” Mr Mountjoy said the lact that many thousands of workers were happily employed in the banks to-day disproved this. “One has only to look at the bank officers seated on both sides of the table at this court to-day to judge for himself whether those officers look like “trapped or down-trodden individuals,” said Mr Mountjoy. Concluding the employers’ case Mr Mountjoy said no evidence would be called by him.