MONEY AND WAGES.

Waipa Post, Volume XXI, Issue 1301, 7 October 1922, Page 4

MONEY AND WAGES.

DURING the current week the President of the Arbitration Court- has made some interesting pronouncements on the subject of wages and conditions of work. His Honour has made it clear that at the present juncture and under existing conditions the Court could not entertain the idea of increasing wages unless some exceptional circumstances were disclosed which would warrant a departure from this general rule. Mr Frazer also commented on the fact that production had not yet reached its pre-war level, though there had been some improvement in recent times. Perhaps the most timely comment of the Court, however, was in relation to the cost of living bonus adjustments. Mr Fraser, in referring to this matter, mentioned that it was the custom In some quarters to refer to these adjustments as a "cut in wages." Such, he explained, was not really the case. What the Court did was to readjust wages in conformity with the movements in the cost of living as disclosed by the Government Statistician's figures. The point His Honour was making, of course, was that assuming the statistics were correct, the adjustment made did not mean a reduction in the purchasing power of wages, but merely a reduction in the amount of money wages—two very different things. The bonuses were added to the wages because of the lessened purchasing power of money, and now that the purchasing power is increasing the bonus is adjusted accordingly, leaving the wage earner as he was. Real wages remain undisturbed by the bonus adjustments.