DENTAL NURSES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22908, 16 June 1936, Page 13

DENTAL NURSES

APPLICATION FOR UNION

REGISTRATION OPPOSED

(Per United Press Association)

WELLINGTON, June 15.

As an application for the registration of a dental and medical nurses' union was followed by an application for a dental nurses' union, the nurses responsible for the first application to-day waited on the Minister of Labour (Mr H. T. Armstrong) requesting that registration should not be granted to a particular section of the industry. The Minister said he did not know of any barrier to medical and dentar nurses being registered as one industrial union, and there would be no bar to private hospital nurses being included, because such hospitals operated for pecuniary gain. Hospital boards, on the other hand, might apply for exemption for hospital nurses, claiming that their hospitals were not operated for gain. If the dental and medical nurses' union secured registration, and provided for dental nurses, registration would have to be refused to any one section on the grounds that there was a union to which they could properly belong. The Minister said he would arrange for the registrar to examine both applications for registration. If the department decided to consider registering a combined union, the other side would have to be advised in order to have an opportunity to show why registration should not be granted. It was not the Government's desire to force the one-big-union idea on people who did not want it, but the machinery had been provided in the new legislation for those who desired it.