eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775580508 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand
The First Forty Years
By James Holt
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 1986 Jill HoltAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-661-5
CHAPTER 1
Origins
New Zealand's system of industrial relations emerged during the 1890s. It was known as the arbitration system, after the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894, on which it was based, and the Arbitration Court, which the Act established. Of course, even under arbitration industrial relations consisted of more than laws and Court awards. It was the interaction of the Arbitration Act with a particular economic structure, social pattern and political tradition which produced the arbitration system. Nevertheless the Arbitration Act is central to the history of industrial relations in New Zealand. This law transformed the structure of trade unionism and the pattern of relationships between employers, employees, and the state in New Zealand. Its passage is a logical starting point for this book.
The Arbitration Act was based on the principle that the state had a right and a duty to intervene in labour disputes and impose a settlement on the parties when they were unable to resolve their differences by peaceful negotiations. Advocates of this viewpoint referred to the policy they wished to implement as compulsory arbitration. Strikes and lockouts, they argued, were intolerable methods of settling differences between employers and employees. They ruined businesses and brought misery to workingmen and their families. They imposed great burdens on innocent third parties, such as workers in related industries, and consumers. They were a barbaric method for adult men and women to settle their differences in civilised countries. Courts of law were established to deal with disputes in other spheres of life and were backed by the authority of governments. So why not the same for labour disputes? 'Compulsory arbitration', the American minister of religion and social reformer Lyman Abbott wrote in 1893, 'is simply the application to the settlement of industrial controversies of the same essential principle which is throughout the civilized world and by all civilized states employed for the settlement of other controversies.'
Critics of compulsory arbitration responded that the remedy would be more harmful than the disease it was meant to cure. It would involve an intolerable interference by the state in the private affairs of individuals, for it meant government authorities telling men to labour and employers to hire at wages they might find unacceptable. In economic terms, it would mean wage-fixing by the state and, some claimed, even price-fixing, and this would interfere with the laws of supply and demand that properly determined wages and prices. Above all, it would be impractical, unless state power was imposed in a draconian fashion, for how could a businessman be compelled to keep his business going if wage rates were imposed upon him that were higher than he could bear? Even more difficult, how could large bodies of workingmen be compelled to work at wages they rejected?
Though the advocates of compulsory arbitration did not sweep all before them, they kept the idea alive in many parts of the western world during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it would be more true to say that events kept the idea alive, for this was an era of prolonged and often violent industrial disputes, like the London dock strike of 1889, the Homestead and Pullman strikes of 1892 and 1894 in the United States, and the maritime strike of 1890 in Australia and New Zealand. The idea that the state should step in and put an end to these bitter and destructive conflicts was bound to occur to many people in many places. In Britain it was advocated by several witnesses before the Royal Commission on Labour, 1892-4, and discussed in parliament during debates on the Trades Disputes Bill in 1895 and 1896. A clamour for it arose whenever one party to a major dispute held out against a settlement, Sidney and Beatrice Webb wrote in 1897. In the United States the future governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, was one of those who advocated compulsory arbitration during the great strike year of 1886. The idea was prominent again in the United States during the 1890s when another wave of strikes and lockouts swept the country. The American Federation of Labor debated its merits in 1892 and 1894 and the subject came up repeatedly at the Congress on Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration organised by the Chicago Civic Federation in 1894. In South Australia, C. C. Kingston introduced a bill to parliament providing for compulsory arbitration in 1890.
In July 1890 W. Downie Stewart, a Member for Dunedin, introduced a bill to the New Zealand parliament providing for the establishment of machinery for voluntary conciliation and arbitration in labour disputes. The concept of compulsory arbitration was discussed by a number of speakers during the debate on Stewart's bill, but in a rather desultory fashion. The Government of the day did not support the measure and it lapsed after a second reading. The following year compulsory arbitration became serious business in New Zealand when it was taken up by William Pember Reeves, a young minister in the newly-formed Liberal Government. Reeves was initially Minister of Education and Justice and did not become Minister of Labour, a newly-created portfolio, until 1892. But Reeves was deeply concerned with labour legislation and labour affairs from the time the Liberal ministry was formed in January 1891. He was widely regarded as labour's representative in the Government, and as a radical. Everyone who has written about the origins of compulsory arbitration in New Zealand has emphasised the role of Reeves, and rightly so. Though not much evidence about the drafting of the arbitration legislation survives, there seems little doubt that Reeves himself was its principal author. Certainly he was the chief advocate and driving force behind the measure. No other cabinet minister played any significant role in the numerous parliamentary debates on the arbitration bill that occurred in the early 1890s. Had Reeves left the ministry before 1894 it seems unlikely that any of his colleagues would have persisted with a bill that was twice emasculated by the Legislative Council, the upper house of New Zealand's parliament. Though the arbitration bill was by no means the only important or controversial legislation Reeves introduced in these years, it was, as he said, his 'pet measure'. He had become, by 1891, an enthusiast for compulsory arbitration and, as one contemporary noted, was 'saturated' in the subject. The passage of the Arbitration Act in 1894 undoubtedly owes much to Reeves's single-minded dedication to the cause. 'But for Reeves's personal effort', his biographer Keith Sinclair has written, 'it is improbable that compulsory arbitration would have been introduced ...'.
Reeves, however, could not have turned his proposal into law without the consent of cabinet and the approval of parliament. Without a favourable political climate no cabinet minister could have achieved the enactment of such an important measure, and the arbitration bill was widely recognised to be an important measure. It is true, as Reeves wrote later, that other proposals of his and the Liberal Government, such as the Shop and Shop Assistants' Act, aroused much more public excitement. Nevertheless, the Arbitration Bill was considered carefully and criticised in detail by the main interested parties, the Employers' Associations and the Trades and Labour Councils. The Auckland Star, a newspaper which supported the Government, thought the arbitration bill 'far more important' than any of Reeves's other labour bills. The New Zealand Herald, an opponent of the Government, devoted fifteen editorials to it, more than to any other labour bill. Members of parliament, according to one estimate, devoted 250,000 words and 385 speeches to it. Compulsory arbitration was not slipped on to New Zealand's statute books unnoticed, and its enactment cannot be explained solely in terms of the dedicated support of one cabinet minister. What must also be taken into account is the political situation in which that minister acted.
One element in that political situation was the same kind of concern about industrial unrest which prompted demands for compulsory arbitration elsewhere. It could not be said that there was a long history of serious industrial conflict in New Zealand before the passage of the Arbitration Act. Its small population, 743,000 at the 1896 census, was widely scattered. The four major towns, Auckland, Wellington, Christ-church, and Dunedin, had non-Maori populations of approximately 51,000, 42,000, 51,000, and 47,000 respectively. The remainder of the European population lived on farms or in small towns and villages. The 1896 census listed only seven boroughs outside the main centres with more than 4000 inhabitants. The Maori population of about 40,000 was overwhelmingly rural at this time. A rather low proportion of the populace worked for wages or salaries. Of 239,862 non-Maori males classed by the census officials as breadwinners in 1896, 42,599 were self-employed, 28,818 were employers of labour, 20,959 worked for relatives without wages or were unclassifiable and 147,986, only 61.7% of the total, were wage and salary earners. The majority of these worked for rather small organisations. The largest commercial enterprises in the colony, as it was then called, were two government departments, the Railways with 4920 employees, and the Post Office with 2709. The Union Steam Ship Company probably employed a few hundred men, and here and there a hundred or more hands worked in a mine, saw-mill, meat-freezing plant, woollen mill, or on wharves. For the most part, however, agriculture, commerce, and industry were dominated by small enterprises, often family-based. In 1896, for example, New Zealand's 85 breweries employed an average of less than six workers apiece; its 90 iron and brass foundries averaged 18 workers; its 71 furniture factories, seven employees. This structure of small enterprises, geographically scattered, did not lend itself to industrial conflict on a large scale.
Trade unionism arrived in New Zealand at an early date as part of the cultural baggage of British immigrants. By the 1860s, unions of printers, engineers, tailors, and bakers existed somewhere in New Zealand, and more small unions appeared and reappeared during the 1870s and early 1880s. Most of them were based on the skilled trades and modelled themselves on or affiliated with British craft unions. That is, they restricted membership to those who had completed apprenticeships or met tests of skill in the relevant trade, they offered members some financial benefits, and they attempted unilaterally to impose their 'rules' on employers, using strike action where necessary. These at least appear to have been the goals of New Zealand's early craft unions. In practice they did well if they managed merely to remain in existence, especially during the depressed 1880s. In Auckland, where there had been 16 unions in 1884, only eight remained by 1888. Membership figures are hard to come by, but the Auckland Carpenters' Union had 123 members in 1884 and 23 in 1888. Where unions of the unskilled existed, they fared even more poorly in the depression years. Only one of the Trades and Labour Councils established in the four main centres survived throughout the depression of the eighties, and outside those centres trade unionism scarcely existed before 1889. H. O. Roth estimates, on admittedly slender evidence, that total trade union membership stood at about 3000 in 1888. Another scholar suggests 'less than 5000'.
In 1889-90, however, New Zealand did experience real labour unrest. A feature of these years was the creation of a host of new unions, many in the semi-skilled and unskilled occupations, and some among women workers. A dramatic rise in trade union membership occurred. In Auckland, for example, the number of unions increased from seven early in 1889 to 34 by late 1890, and the total number of unionists there rose to about 5000. The largest of the new unions in Auckland were the wharf labourers, tailoresses, and timbermill hands. Among the others were unions of wharf carters, gum storemen, shop assistants, gasworkers, and gumdiggers, but many new unions from the more skilled trades, such as shipwrights, butchers, saddlers, and tanners, also sprang up or were reformed. Similar developments occurred in the other centres and in the smaller towns and country districts and estimates of the total number of union members in New Zealand at the height of the union boom of 1889-90 range as high as 60,000. Even if the most modest estimates, which put the figure at around 20,000, are accepted, this represents a four to six-fold increase in union membership within the space of two years. There have been various explanations for this sudden surge in union growth. Similar developments overseas, the London dock strike of 1889 and the 'new unionism' in Britain and Australia, which were well reported in New Zealand, are generally thought to have had a stimulating effect. Ian Merrett places some emphasis on an economic upswing which increased labour's bargaining power in these years, but in Auckland William Russell argues there was no economic upswing. He suggests the stimulus there came from outside the colony, from the southern centres, and from local successes by the seamen in 1888 and the tailoresses in 1890. In any case, the rapid growth of unionism, especially among the unskilled, obviously increased the potential for conflicts between capital and labour.
A second and related development in 1889-90 was the formation of the Maritime Council, only one of several colony-wide union organisations to be formed in these years, but the most important. The leading figure in this body was J. A. Millar of the Seamen's Union, whose initial aim seems to have been to unite the seamen, wharf labourers and coalminers into a single body with which to confront more effectively the powerful Union Steam Ship Company, the major employer of seamen around the New Zealand coast, and of course, a major user of coal and wharves. The power inherent in this combination and the effectiveness of Millar's leadership attracted more affiliations, and by the middle of 1890 the Maritime Council was beginning to look like an all-embracing labour federation with its leaders acting on behalf of unions in a variety of disputes. Thus by 1890 New Zealand not only had a much larger trade union movement than it had known before but an ably-led national organisation of workers which was based on the key transport sector and included seamen, wharf labourers in all the main ports, coalminers, merchant marine officers, and railway workers.
A feature of many of the new unions of 1889-90 and of the Maritime Council itself was their interest in developing close ties and even formal affiliations with labour organisations in the Australian colonies. These links seemed sensible to the New Zealand unions because the Australasian colonies formed a common labour market with much to-ing and fro-ing by workingmen across the Tasman, and because unions in south-eastern Australia were generally larger, older, and stronger than their New Zealand counterparts. It was the Australian connection which led the Maritime Council and its affiliates into the maritime strike of 1890, New Zealand's first great labour conflict. The maritime strike was essentially an Australian affair, but the New Zealand Maritime Council became involved when seamen on a Union Steam Ship Company vessel unloading in Sydney walked off their ships in protest against the company's use of non-union wharf labour there. This soon escalated into an all-out conflict between the Union Company and the Maritime Council over the right of union men to decline to work alongside non-unionists. Several thousand seamen, wharf labourers, coalminers and some railwaymen were involved in the strike which lasted 11 weeks and ended in a total triumph for the employers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand by James Holt. Copyright © 1986 Jill Holt. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Laurence James Holt (1939–1983): a Memoir,
Preface,
1 Origins,
2 The Arbitration System Emerges, 1894–1901,
3 1901–1908,
4 1909–1913,
5 War and Inflation, 1914–1920,
6 Stabilisation, 1920–5,
7 The Farmers' Revolt, 1926–1935,
Appendices:,
I: Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, 1894,
II: Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Amendment Act, 1908,
III: Judges and Assessors of the Court of Arbitration,
Bibliography,
Index,