Industrial Concilliation.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5334, 12 August 1895, Page 4

Industrial Concilliation.

With a view to increasing the efficiency and usefulness of the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, the Minister of Labour has prepared an amending measure. It is a brief Bill of seven clauses, but some of its provisions are calculated to prove of value. For instance, it proposes to amend the principal Act by substituting the word "workers" for "workmen" wherever it occurs, and in this way the benefits of Conciliation Boards and Arbitration Courts will be extended to young persons and women who might, by a rigid interpretation of the original Act, be excluded. Another clause proposes to remedy an omission in last year'p Act by giving the Governor power to appoint members to the Conciliation and Arbitration Boards and Courts when for any reason there is a failure to constitute these bodies. The third section of the principal Act will also be amended. The minimum number required to constitute an industrial union of employers is declared to be five, but each individual resident partner in any firm is to be computed as a member, and any incorporated or registered company may be tegietsred as an industrial union. An important modifying provision is that wherever technical questions are involved in any dispute referred to a Board or Court for settlement, each party may nominate an expert,and these shall sit as assessors and be deemed members of the Board or Court for the purposes of the particular dispute. As the law now stands it is feared that employers may, in some cases, evade appeals to Conciliation Boards by terminating the engagements of the workmen with whom a dispute may arise. It is therefore proposed that in the case of disputes regarding employment or wages, the relationship of the employer and employed must have ceased for three months before the dispute was referred to the Board or Court, in order to avoid the jurisdiction of theße bodies. It is not likely tbat there will be any opposition to these amendments, because, though no hitch has arisen in the working of the Act, for the very sufficient and satisfactory reason that the law has not yet been invoked, the proposals are so reasonable, and so obviously required, as to recommend them to parliamentary approval.