The Wanganui Chronicle. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1948. OUR ONCE DAILY BREAD

Wanganui Chronicle, 15 September 1948, Page 4

The Wanganui Chronicle. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1948. OUR ONCE DAILY BREAD

one time bread was baked daily with the exception o£ Sundays and this bread was made available to the public on six days of the week. Today the Arbitration Court is dissatisfied with the bread that is being delivered on five days of the week. If extraction of flour from wheat was reduced from 80 per eent. to 72 per cent, the Court believed that this would be helpful in improving the bread available to the people of New Zealand. The majority of the people would agree that this might help. The American military personnel in New Zealand found that the bread which the public was eating was not good enough for American soldiers and so the Government had to agree that the American personnel in the country should enjoy a higher quality of bread than did the resident population. It is not surprising, therefore- to find that the Court should express itself upon the subject of the quality of the bread retailed to the public today. But what has the Arbitration Court done to bring about a more satisfactory bread supply? It has perpetuated what for two and a half years has been an illegal situation. There is no attempt to protect the public, but that may be regarded as beyond the ambit of the Court. It is for Parliament to decree what shall be done in this respect and it is for the Administration to carry out that which Parliament decrees. Unfortunately the majority in Parliament, too, is unconcerned about the daily bread of the people and the Administration is unwilling to enforce the law. So the Arbitration Court comes along and at the first opportunity makes legal that which has long been illegal. This is a sure way of bringing the arbitration law into public contempt. Possibly the Court has achieved this by now and the question to be asked today is whether a Court so functioning is worthy of being retained.

In the course of his judgment and that of the workers’ assessor, Mr. Justice Tyndall said that in 1936 the Court of Arbitration had found that it was impracticable to carry out the bread-baking industry efficiently on a forty hour week, and fixed the ordinary weekly hours of work for the industry at 44. Notwithstanding this the Legislature in 1945 fixed the ordinary working week at forty hours for workers in bakeries. The Legislature also overrode the Court which had previously found that it was necessary for ten hours to be worked on one day of the week without payment of overtime, by decreeing that the ordinary hours of baking could not exceed eight in one day. The Legislature also directed the Court to endeavour to fix the daily working hours so that Saturday was a free day, but the Court found that to spread a working week of 40 hours over six days would give insufficient time each day to complete the processes incidental to the production of bread in the average bakehouse. This is no more than a catalogue of how the Legislature has over-riden the findings of the Court of Arbitration.

This conduct of the Legislature no doubt was prompted by the ability of the Bakers’ Union to approach the Government and get what the Court, in its judgment, deemed to be undesirable. But when the Legislature did not move fast enough the Union took matters into its own hands and refused to abide by the Award which governed the industry and its members refused to work on Saturday, award or no award. The Administration looked on “with a smile so bland” that the Union persisted in its course of action and then went to the Court of Arbitration and asked it. to sanction the continuing breach and go further and write the breach into the new award and burn all its previous decisions and forget about them. The workers’ assessor would not long have remained an assessor had he taken a view other than that advanced by the union- and the employers’ assessor could not be expected to eat the Court’s words in so wholesale a manner and in so doing making himself the laughing stock of the community.

Mr. W. Cecil Prime, however, went on record as follows: He regarded the majority decision of the Court on hours of work as a capitulation to and condonation of the illegal action of the workers’ union in instructing its members to refuse to work on Saturdays. He would not be a party to the decision. There had been defiance of the law by the union, condonation of it, overtime rates granted for Fridays before the 40 hours of the week had been worked, and the result—stale bread for the public. Although no proceedings had been taken against the union for its action, prosecutions (and appeals where initial prosecution had proved successful) had been pressed with vigour against employers who merely exercised their legal rights by deducting wages for time not worked in denial of their proper and legitimate requirements. This was not a question of extra rates of pay for work on Saturdays. It was a case of a group of workers arbitrarily and militantly deciding that their desire for a free Saturday must come before the law and before the right of the public to be supplied with fresh bread. But why go on with Mr. Prime’s protest ? This setting of the Court at. naught by the Government of the day, this unwillingness to enforce the law impartially, this chaos where the rule of law should prevail can be amended by the, public. The public has it within its power to put an end to this sorry state of affairs and to insist upon this chaotic condition being wiped away. It will require to elect men to Parliament, who are not spineless nonentities who dare not open their mouths in support of the public. Every housewife should be certain to vote against every Government candidate, and in Wanganui this means voting against Mr. Cotterill—the man who has failed Wanganui’s education institutions, who has failed to see that adequate attention is paid to Wanganui’s housing, who has failed to see to the repatriation of the returned soldiers of the district, who has failed to protest against the bakers’ illegal action. Get rid of this failure ami replace him with a representative of the City and then there will be a prospect of the rule of law returning to this community. Vote for him again and this country will not only eat the stale bread of industrial anarchy, but will be required to eat the bitter bread of a defeated people.