WAGE RATE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17451, 27 December 1930, Page 5

WAGE RATE

JUDGE ON FIXATION SINGLE MEN MUST TAKE LESS SYDNEY, Dec. 9. Chief Judge Dethridgc, in the Arbitration Court yesterday, made a spirited attack on the method of fixing the Australian basic wage. With Mr. Justice Becby and Mr. Justice Drake-Brockman, Jlis Honor was hearing the claim by various employers’ interests for a variation of the basic wage.

“If the married man and bis family are to have a reasonable degree of comfort,” Chief Judge Detluidge said, “some system of differential payments must be introduced. The country cannot afford to pay a flat rate sufficient for a man and his wife ami three children to the single man and the childless couple. All the evidence suggests that, to give the mart, wife, and three children anything like'the Piddington standard of reasonable comfort, the single man anti the childless couple must take a good deal less.”

“In this court,” IT is Honor said, "we must adopt a compromise—a sum which is not sufficient to maintain a man and his wife and three children in reasonable comfort. In my opinion, it has never been enough to give the family the reasonable comfort which Mr. Justice Piddington found. The job which faces Parliaments and courts is to get Hie single man to take less. No basic wage tins court can introduce can ever be a satisfactory basic wage. It merely becomes a question as to what is the best, in a rough and ready fashion, for this court to do.”

“No political body,” Ilis Honor went on to say, “dare say to the unmarried elector : “Jake less, so that- a liaidstricken father may keep his family of four in comfort.’ We linve the spectacle of the family man struggling with adversity, and the single man laughing in Ins sleeve.” Judge Drake-Brockman: l nlil he is married. Chief Judge Dethridgc: 3 es, until he is married. Then his time comes, and it serves him right.