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Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume LVIII, Issue 8941, 16 December 1907, Page 4

No less than 146 pages of the December number of the Labour Journal are devoted to new awards. A return showing the number of disputes created by the Arbitration Act up to date might be instructive. It would possibly read, "disputes instigated by employees, 1000; disputes instigated by employers, nil." The one-sidedness of our labour legislation is appalling. The Act manufactures strait-waist-coats for the employers of labour throughout the land. It assumes that all employers are mad, and that if they had their liberty they would seriously injure the workers. Therefore every employer in New Zealand must wear one strait-waistcoat or more. In our own case, we wear three of these strait-waistcoats, and though it is possible to conduct a business with them, it is a little trying to do so, more especially in hot weather. It is these strait-waist-coats which have brought about rings and combines all over the colony. These are coming up like mushrooms, and every new award means a new ring or a new combine. This labour legislation is the price the Liberal Government has had to pay for the political support of the Labour party. The Government has still to feed this party, and when it proposes to put a hundred thousand pounds building in one place and a hundred and fifty thousand pound structure in another, It is just keeping the Labour party in good humour. The hundred thousand pound building is probably only worth seventy thousand pounds, and the hundred and fifty thousand pound building will probably be worth only a hundred thousand pounds, but the money for the splash is borrowed, and for this "reason may be wasted. It is not'reproductive in the sense that it

would be if it were expended on roads and.bridges to bring land in the back blocks into profitable cultivation. The big building jobs which the Government launch tend to raise the rate of wages in every part of the Dominion.