Recent experience with compulsory arbitration in Australia

It is open to question whether the Australian system of compulsory arbitration which has been in effect now for over thirty years has made for a reduction in industrial disputes. In their awards affecting working conditions, the arbitration courts have provided protection and fair treatment to the workers and removed some of the causes of industrial friction without seriously hampering the operating efficiency of private enterprise. Against this is the probability that the system, if it has not actually heightened the cleavage between capital and labor, has not served to bring them closer together. Strikes have persisted, although perhaps with lessened intensity. The Australian arbitration system has been more successful in the original determination and subsequent adjustment of minimum wages. The arbitration courts have succeeded in eliminating excessively low wages and in maintaining a considerable degree of wage flexibility in the face of a very strong and articulate trade-union movement. In addition to making semi-automatic downward adjustments in wages to the cost of living in the depression, the Commonwealth Arbitration Court decreed a special reduction of 10 per cent in the basic wage in January, 1931, in order to meet the crisis.