TRADE UNION LAW.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19490, 20 November 1926, Page 12

TRADE UNION LAW.

The introduction of a private member's bill in the House of Commons this week to make strikes and lockouts illegal without preliminary reference of the dispute to an arbitration tribunal will probably prove to have been merely an illustration of that impatient advocacy of a specific idea that has frequent expression in all Parliaments. A more comprehensive proposal, incorporating the results of laborious examination and patient deliberation of the problem, has been promised by the Government. That there will be any provision for compulsory arbitration may be doubted. The indications are that the measure will be restricted to a revision of trade union law, not with any intention of destroying the system, but with the single purpose of restoring the rights of members to control the policy and the actions of their unions. Addressing the Conserva tive Conference at Scarborough last month, Mr. Baldwin claimed that m the earlier days of the trade union movement, thp Conservative Party did more than any other to create and consolidate that movement, and he declared that the state of society still requires collective bargaining and trade unions. The subject was exhaustively discussed by the con ference before it unanimously adopted a resolution, drafted by members of trade unions, recommending the Government to introduce legislation to make illegal any strike called without a secret ballot of the members of the trade union affected; to increase the security of the individual worker against victimisation and intimidation on account of. his political beliefs ; to make mass picketing and the picketing of a man's private residence illegal; and to require the national accounts of tra le unions to be audited by certified chartered accountants. The debate was distinguished by an entire absence of hostility to trade unions in general, the attack being directed against the abuses of the system which have robbed individual trade unionists of their liberty, and against such abuses of the existing law as the modern development of so-called peaceful picketing. As one speaker suggested, the task of the Conservative Party should be to make articulate the majority who now suffer under the yoke of the younger noisy element. The Government takes a still wider view of its responsibility. Its task, in Mr. Baldwin's definition, is to reconcile the rights of men in combination with the rights of individuals, and both of them in relation to the wider community of which they are only a part.