A Wellington correspondent writes:—

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25866, 9 June 1945, Page 2

A Wellington correspondent writes:—

At Oakland, California, some world labour leaders have agreed on a constitution for a new World Federation of Trade Unions. We are told that it prescribes the escalator method of voting, whereby organisations with a huge membership like the Russian trade unions, have relatively few votes thus removing the fear of Russian ' domination. Will you please explain the escalator method of voting? An escalator is, of course, a moving stairway or laddsr. How it came to be used to describe a method of vot-

ing is not clear, except that the process of allotting votes is not a fixed scale but graduated to limit the voting strength of powerful unions. For example, a union with 100 members might have 10 votes, with 200 members 15 votes, and so on, reducing the’votes for each successive 100 members, and perhaps imposing a limit of 20 votes even though the union has 1000 members. This method is often applied in companies to prevent a few wealthy shareholders from out-voting the smaller shareholders. It contradicts the principle of one man one vote. The correspondent need, therefore, not hope to see it applied in Parliamentary elections. Civls.