The Star. MONDAY, JUNE 7, 1920. CAPITAL AND LABOUR.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19968, 7 June 1920, Page 6

The Star. MONDAY, JUNE 7, 1920. CAPITAL AND LABOUR.

4 A great deal of interest will-be attached to the conference of employers which is to bo held in Wellington next Wednesday. It is stated that the business of the conference is to consider tho industrial situation in the Dominion, but no definite. lino of discussion has been drawn up. Invitations have been sent out to representatives of the Industrial Corporation of New Zealand, the Chambers of Commerce, the Farmers’ Union, and the Welfare League. The body convening the gathering is tho New Zealand Employers’ Federation. It will be seen that the conference will bo fairly representative of capital, and that its deliberations may have an important bearing on industrial peace or war in the near future. There is a suggestion that the main business of the conference will be to devise some workable scheme of settling disputes without interference on tne part of the Legislature—in other words, that Labour should be invited to throw the Arbitration and Conciliation Act overboard and accept some other method of arriving at agieements winch shall bo mutually binding. It is true that among a certain section of Labour there has been a-growing dissatisfaction with tho Arbitration Court. The Court would not go as far as the workers demanded of it, and some of the militant unions discovered that better terms could he extracted from tho employers ov methods savouring of direct action. These unions, when approached with proposals to submit their claims to the Arbitration Court, replied with uncompromising refusals. They had “no faith in the Arbitration Court,” and u ere confident of their ability to compel better terms than would bo given by the judicial tribunal. Other unions have gone to the Court more or less unwillingly, in some cases merely to got approval of agreements which had been arrived at after prolonged negotiations in which threats to strike or “go slow ” had player, a not unimportant part. It would ne a mistake for the Employers’ Conference to » Giime that the workers ns a whole avo prepared to agree to tho repeal of tho Act. To the great majority of Now Zealand workers the Act opens the one path which leads to the reasoned discussion of their conditions of labour. The fact that the Court is kept hard at work the whole year round shows taat it is far from being a moribund institution; indeed it may fairly be said that much of the dissatisfaction felt by the average worker in regard to the Court is caused by the too frequent delays in dealing with disputes. The con'tention that Labour in the Dominion would readily assent to the repeal of tho Act is based on far too slender grounds to carry conviction. The conference of employers this week will perform an important service if it can produce a scheme of determining industrial disputes which will be acceptable to the workers as a whole, but it is doubtful if any scheme which is designed to get rid of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act will bo sati'sfactory.