WASTE OF TIME.

Observer, Volume XXXV, Issue 51, 28 August 1915, Page 2

WASTE OF TIME.

A New Zealand Industry

A WORKER was fined at Wanganui the other day for not joining a union when requested to do so. A worker in New Zealand, which still has an Industrial Arbitration Act, therefore has no legal right to refuse to belong to an organisation, however much he may dislike it. The law has done more and is doing more to sap individualism audi independence than anything ever set on (paiper. There is no reason why, if a person is bound by law to join a union, he should not be bound by law to remain in that union for ever. One is as fair as the other. The real protection of any worker is his skill. If he is so unskilled that he must have an organisation' to force recognition of him as equal to every other worker of his class, he's a poor thing, and little good to a country that will some day have to fight all it knows for commercial existence. The people who insist on a cut and dried system 'which says one man is equal to every other man of the same class are the nation's drag. They, among other things, determine that the lowest possible skill is the standard to he set in the country.

New Zealand, has been able to manage very well up to now to earn a living by the exercise of the least possible exertion and a minimum of skill—the chief reason _ being the enormous protective dluties imposed on every rival article that reaches this country. The bulk of the business done in New Zealand (apart from >primary iproduction) is mere distribution work. The majority of people subsist. merely by the grace of oversea manufacturers. The inventors of Arbitration created a system which suggested that all employers were robbers, all workers victims, all wages the outcome of slavery, and all men (other than employers) equal, and banded together

for common protection against the aggressor. *A single alteration of the sinister situation: in the international theatre could bring all thetse artificial protective organisations upheld by the law of the land clattering about the ears of the inventors. In short, the protection of any union or the Arbitration Act is of no service if there isi no work to be done. It is at least conceivable that the whole commercial future of New Zealand, or of any other country, oouildl be shattered by a single blow in Europe. We haggle about unessentials while the earth is ablaze, because the blaze has not caught a little country which is always alight with artificial fire. It does not matter, for instance, that an event in Europe could smash the liquor trade in New Zealand. What matters is that a Wanganui barmaid is breaking the law by not being a unionist, a solemn magistracy ? of course, being justified in administering a law madei at a time when world war seemed inconceivable.

A blow that struck New Zealand itself physically and commercially would immediately upset every false idea of organised' "equality." All artificial restrictions on labour or capital would cease. Labour would seize amy opportunity of employ without haggling. Capital wouldn't feel itself bound to pay the same to the "pointer" as to the efficient. In a system which makes the lowest type of skill as payable as the highest, the incentive to excel is lacking. The ambition to achieve a competency by the least possible exercise of skill is a weakness that New Zealand will yet regret. Short of the oompliete overthrow of civilisation, the end of the war will see a tremendous rush of the nations to holdl the thread® of disorganised trade. New Zealand! is making preparations. She does not want to know whether she can support herself, but only "who is going to support us?" The impossibility _of inducing a national commercial, as well as national military view will occur to anyone who has studied the subject. The big man doesn't worry about the goods he is going to make, but the profits he is going to make under the altered conditions that are inevitable. The small man is worrying about the proportion of cash he will be able to extract from the big mam, who couldn't be a big man except for the people overseas. It is inconceivable to either that we could be self-supporting, or that anything could possibly happen' to impose selfsupport on us. The country which wastes precious time needed for real organisation on petty law points simply dbesn't appreciate the position.