With regard to workers of higher skill, who command wages or salaries on a more generous scale, the interest of the community is of a different kind.  Such workers hardly stand in need of any special protection.  They are well able to take care of themselves, and sometimes through combination are, in fact, the stronger party in the industrial bargain.  In this region the interest of the community lies in maintaining industrial peace and securing the maximum of goodwill and co-operation.  The intervention of the community in industrial disputes, however, has never been very popular with either party in the State.  Both sides to a dispute are inclined to trust to their own strength, and are only ready to submit to an impartial judgment when convinced that they are momentarily the weaker.  Nor is it easy when we once get above the minimum to lay down any general principles which a court of arbitration could apply in grading wages.

For these reasons the movement for compulsory arbitration has never in this country advanced very far.  We have an Industrial Court which can investigate a dispute, find a solution which commends itself as reasonable, and publish its finding, but without any power of enforcement.  The movement has for the present stuck there, and is likely to take a long time to get further.  Yet every one recognises the damage inflicted by industrial disputes, and would admit in the abstract the desirability of a more rational method of settlement than that of pitting combination against combination.  Such a method may, I would suggest, grow naturally out of the system which has been devised for the protection of unskilled and unorganised workers, of which a brief account may now be given.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF TRADE BOARDS

Utilising experience gained in Australia, Parliament in 1909 passed an Act empowering the Board of Trade (now the Ministry of Labour) to establish a Trade Board in any case where the rate of wages prevailing in any branch was “exceptionally low as compared with that in other employments.”  The Board consisted of a number of persons selected by the Minister as representatives of employers, an equal number as representatives of the workers, with a chairman and generally two colleagues not associated with the trade, and known as the Appointed Members.  These three members hold a kind of casting vote, and can in general secure a decision if the sides disagree.

No instruction was given in the statute as to the principles on which the Board should determine wages, but the Board has necessarily in mind on the one side the requirements of the worker, and on the other the economic position of the trade.  The workers’ representatives naturally emphasise the one aspect and the employers the other, but the appointed members and the Board as a whole must take account of both.  They must consider what the trade in general can afford to pay and yet continue to prosper and to give full