Seanad Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 18 Jul 1945

Vol. 30 No. 4

Agricultural Wages (Amendment) Bill, 1945—Second Stage.

Question proposed: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

Minister for Agriculture (Dr. Ryan)

The Agricultural Wages Act, 1936, provided for the fixing of minimum rates of wages for agricultural workers, made it an offence for an agricultural employer to pay an agricultural worker less than the minimum rate, and gave the agricultural worker power to recover by civil proceedings any sums due to him on account of payment of wages at less than the appropriate minimum rate. The Act, however, did not provide any limit to the period in respect of which such arrears of wages could be recovered. That is one of the principal points dealt with in this Bill. There are five principal sections and as this is an amending Bill it would be well to deal with them. Section 1 deals with the definition of contract. Under the Act there are two types of contract of employment, one for a period less than five months and the other for a period of five months or over. In the first case wages are fixed for a week of 54 hours and, in the second case, there is no specification of the hours worked in a week. Section 1 is merely to bring the present amending Bill into conformity with the principal legislation and, therefore, is of no great importance. Section 2 deals with a point that gave me, personally, a great deal of trouble and worry during the last seven or eight years. Under the Principal Act the Minister has to determine whether the work is agricultural work or not. In many cases legal questions arise and I feel that it is not appropriate for the Minister to decide these; that it is better they should be referred to the courts to decide whether the work is agricultural or not. The effect of the section is to ask the court to decide that issue.

Section 3 is not of any great importance, because it would not be operative at all unless Section 4 becomes operative. The section deals with summary prosecution cases where an employer was not paying the appropriate wage, and where, incidentally, in addition to that offence, he was at the same time building up arrears of wages. Section 3 merely limits the arrears in such cases to two years, the same as in Section 4.

Section 4 is the principal section, as it seeks to limit to two years the period during which arrears of wages may be payable to the employee. It lays down that the employee must make the claim within two years of leaving the employment. As the legislation stands, if an employee has worked for less than the minimum rate for an employer, he can claim for the difference between the fixed wage and the wage he was working for, over any number of years. From the point of view of the employer and the employee, I think the present arrangement very bad. From 95 to 97 per cent. of the farmers are quite prepared to comply with the law, and are glad to pay a decent wage to an employee but a very small percentage, I must admit, of employers, for one reason or another, are anxious to get an employee to work at less than the minimum wage if they can get away with it. But the employee who takes such a position would be doing a great disservice to his colleagues, because in a particular district, where it is known that a particular man is working for less than the minimum wage, that has an adverse effect on the labour market, so that employees in that area are somewhat at a disadvantage in regard to the minimum wage. I should say, taking the cases that have been put to me, that it is much more important from the point of view of the employees to have this amendment made than in the case of employers, because employer have to pay in the end. But it has such a bad effect on the employee's colleagues that we should try to make it right as soon as possible. That is looking at it from the material interest of employer and employee, but looking at it from the higher standpoint, that of justice, in the case of the employer who gets a man at less than the minimum wage, if we say to an employee that he must come along within two years and claim what is due to him, and if we make that the law, I have no doubt that employees in general will come along within two years and that employers will have to pay up. Therefore, I think we may leave the employers out of the question, because we may take it for granted that they will have to pay in genuine cases of contract for agricultural service between the ordinary farmer and the ordinary labourer. Really what induced me to bring in the amending Bill was representations from the agricultural wages committees and the Agricultural Wages Board.

I cannot expect Senators to be familiar with all the details of administration. They may not be familiar with the constitution of these boards. We have the Twenty-Six Counties divided into five area committees. There are five or six counties represented on each committee, and on each committee we have representatives of employers and employees. These committees meet from time to time under the chairmanship of the Chairman of the Agricultural Wages Board. They make recommendations which are afterwards considered by the Agricultural Wages Board. The board is composed of four representatives of employers and four representatives of employees, as well as three neutral members. These are not farmers or farm labourers. They are neutral members, and are there to advise the chairman in case there is a clash of interests between the two parties. Now, as a matter of fact, in our activities so far, the board have usually agreed unanimously to any proposition that they did agree to, and the neutral members, therefore, had very little to do, but the point at issue here is this matter of arrears of wages. All these agricultural committees agreed unanimously —both employers' representatives and employees' representatives—that we should limit the period within which arrears should be paid. As a matter of fact, the limit that they unanimously agreed to and put up to me was 12 months. That proposal was agreed to unanimously by these committees and put up to me, but I thought that 12 months was too short a period, and accordingly I put in two years instead. That is the period that is fixed in this particular clause—two years.

Now, first of all, I should like Senators to keep in mind that where you have the ordinary case of the ordinary farmer and the ordinary labourer, and where the ordinary labourer, for one reason or another, agrees to take 36/- or 38/- a week instead of 40/- a week, which, I think, is the minimum wage for agricultural labourers in most parts of the country, it is reasonable to say that if the employee concerned gets sorry afterwards and wants to claim the balance due to him, he should get two years in which to make his claim, and no more, and that even from the point of view of his fellow-workers that is a good thing. From the point of view of the employer, although, to some extent, it may have been his own fault, it is also a good thing because, not alone will he have to pay up the arrears of wages, but he may be penalised by a fine in court, which might amount to more than the arrears of wages due. However, it was not the ordinary case that the agricultural committees had in mind, but rather some peculiar types of cases, of which I propose to give a few examples. No. 1 is the case where the employee is a relative of the employer, and No. 2 is where the employee is employed by an employer who has a shop in the local town as well as a farm in the country. Practically all these peculiar cases fall into those two classes. One case came before me in 1943. That was the case of a widower in the country who had a small farm. A cousin of his who was, as one might say, I suppose, at a loose end and looking for a job, came to the widower and said, in the usual way: "Well, I am a cousin of yours, and you might give me a job, and I will not expect much in the way of wages." They agreed between themselves, and they lived together. The wages were not very high, but the employee was treated in the same way as the employer; he dined at the same table with his employer and went out, I presume, in the evening, with the employer to the local publichouse, had a few drinks, tobacco, and so on; but the wages were not high. The employee was a rather oldish man; it was a small farm, and for the six winter months they had very little work to do. They just marked time, so to speak, attended to a few cows, and so on, and between them they did very little work in the day. After seven years, however, they fell out, and the employee claimed the sum of £303 12s. 2½d. If he had succeeded in his claim—I am not sure if he did succeed; I think he did not—it would have meant that he would have become the owner of the farm, and the other fellow would have been his employee. Not that that would have made very much difference in the particular case, and I suppose the same thing would happen again and they would both live together; but it just goes to show you what can happen where the rules and regulations are so rigid and where an employee must be paid a minimum wage.

That is one example, and we have many others, of relatives being employed in similar circumstances. Let us come now to the case of a small shopkeeper. In this case the shopkeeper was a lady who owned a small shop. I do not know if Senators have observed this in the country—I know that I have observed it many years ago —that a man is more willing to work with a country shopkeeper or publican with a bit of land at much lower wages than with the ordinary farmer.

A Senator

Why?

Dr. Ryan

I do not exactly know why, but one man said to me: "Well, my chances are good, and I would have no chance on the farm". At any rate, they are prepared to work for less wages, whatever the reason may be. This lady had a small shop, and the man concerned agreed to work with her for a small wage because his chances were good, but his "chances" were not recognised by the Agricultural Wages Board. He came along afterwards and claimed £400, and the lady in question said: "Well, if he succeeds in his claim he can have the farm and the shop and I will go to work for him". Another case that I shall give is that of a man with a small business and farm of, I think, 11 acres, who employed a man under certain conditions, to which the employee agreed. After five years they had a falling out, and the claim put in by the employee was for £250. Now, these are typical cases where any ordinary person would say that it was not fair, since the particular man went to work with a relative or with a country shopkeeper and said that he was quite satisfied with the wages he was given in the beginning. Probably, he was quite satisfied for four, five or six years, until they had a falling out, and then, owing to the law and the rigid nature of the regulations, that man could practically claim his employer's whole estate and become owner himself.

These are the types of cases we have in mind in the amendment in Section 4. I would have been very anxious, if possible, to deal with these peculiar cases in another way, but it does not appear to be possible to do so. If we were to say, for instance, that a second cousin could not claim against a third cousin, and so on, or that an employee could not make a claim against a man who had both a shop and a farm, we might be doing an injustice to the employee in such cases, and so, I think, it is better to treat the matter in the way proposed here.

If the relative or the shopkeeper concerned is foolish enough to make such an agreement and to take on a person to work under such conditions, then the worst that can happen to the employer is that he or she will have to make up the two years' difference between what was agreed to and the minimum wage, and I think that so far as the genuine employer is concerned, we can agree that if the employee feels that he is not being properly treated, the fact that he has two years in which to make up his mind about claiming the arrears ought to be sufficient to satisfy him.

Section 5 deals with a somewhat different type of case from those in Section 4. In the Principal Act it was laid down that if both the employer and the employee agreed that the employee was not of full mental and physical capacity and made an application to the board accordingly, the board might grant an exemption from the minimum wage requirement.

There was not a very large number of cases. I think that in all there were about 2,000 cases in which applications were made under the Act since its passage in 1936. What happened in all those cases was that we sent an inspector to investigate. We never agreed without sending an inspector to see both employer and employee, and in about 75 per cent. of the cases exemption was granted. Then the employer was free to employ the particular person without paying the minimum wage, but there have again been cases of great hardship where employers did not know there was such provision under the Act and where they neglected to exercise their rights under the Act.

I can recollect one case in particular, in County Tipperary, where there was a mentally defective person who could not get work and who was in a very pitiable state indeed. He was fairly useful on a farm, but he was not by any means capable of carrying out all farm operations, and the clergyman came to a certain farmer and asked him to take on this poor man. The farmer said that the man was not worth the wage and the clergyman replied that he would work for half the wage. The farmer said that was all he was worth and after great persuasion gave him a job. After four or five years, this man was evidently instructed in his rights, and he applied to the court to secure payment of the difference between the minimum wage and the wage at which he had been working. As the Act stood, he was entitled to it, and he got a large sum of money.

Section 5 of the Bill proposes to give an opportunity to an employer to plead before the court that the employee was not of sound mind or physically sound, and if the court believes or is satisfied that the complaint is justified, then they may, as it were, retrospectively decide that the person was not of sound mind or physically sound, and in that case the arrears of wages could not be granted.

Section 6 deals with the title and the code of legislation. I think that is all I have to say in asking the Seanad to agree to the Second Reading of this Bill.

Mr. Duffy

I think that the explanation of Section 5 which the Minister has just given probably explains the whole attitude of his Department to the Act of 1936. Section 5 deals with the people who are presumed to be mentally deficient, and I imagine the Bill is designed very largely for those who are mentally deficient, because the proposal here is to cover the case of a man, such as this workman in Tipperary, who was employed at less than the minimum rate. It is going to be open to the employer, in his defence to an action in which the workman is claiming repayment to him of the difference between the minimum rate and what he is receiving, to say that the man was mentally deficient, and I imagine that any court will hold that a man who has been accepting 10/- a week when the minimum is 40/- a week was mentally deficient. If the Minister succeeds in persuading the House to adopt Section 5, I think he can drop the rest of the Bill.

On the whole, his approach to this situation is desperately reactionary. Take, for instance, his proposal to repeal Section 2 of the Principal Act. Section 2 followed the line of policy which has been pursued by this Government for 12 or 13 years, that was to say, that in cases of dispute in regard to the interpretation of something or other, the decision was given by the Minister rather than by the court. Many people would quarrel with that policy. I remember there was a quarrel over the National Health Insurance Act, the Act which unified health insurance societies, because the former practice of referring to the court questions of interpretation was abandoned and the Minister claimed the right to determine any matter in dispute as to whether a person was insurable or things of that kind.

Something similar has been done under the Unemployment Assistance Act, a departure from the order Unememployment Insurance Acts where a court, actually the High Court, determined whether a person was or was not insurable. That policy was followed in this Act of placing on the Minister the right to determine a matter in dispute or whether a person is an agricultural worker or not. On previous occasions that policy was defended by the Minister's colleagues on the grounds that it would be unreasonable to put people, particularly people without any organisation behind them, to the expense of going to court to have their status determined, and some people who took the view that those competent to interpret an Act are the courts, accepted the argument put up by the Government that it would be unreasonable to force workmen to have their rights determined in court when the Minister was just as capable and competent as any court to decide matters of that kind.

Now, the Minister abandons that and he has put nothing in its place. He repeals sub-section (2) of Section 2 of the 1936 Act so that if a workman takes a case, say, to the Circuit Court or the District Court, for repayment of a sum of money due to him, and the employer raises the issue that the employment was not agricultural work, it is not clear who is going to determine it or who is not going to determine it. The District Court may take the view that they were not competent to decide it. It may have to go elsewhere. No provision is being put into the new legislation to take the place of provisions of sub-section (2) of Section 2 which are being repealed, under which the Minister has placed upon him the responsibility of defining whether the particular employment was or was not agricultural work. I think that is a mistake.

The Minister ought to make it clear what the procedure will be in future when a question arises as to whether a particular job is or is not agricultural work, and the method should be inexpensive and simple. It has been argued by various people, the Minister himself included, that the number of people organised in agricultural employment is small. The Minister put the figure at less than 2 per cent. in any organisation at all, which means there are many of these cases. The claimant is then a poor man who has no money to risk on briefing barristers, paying solicitors or, in fact, in losing time attending the court.

In regard to the next point, the limit of two years in respect of which a workman can recover, seems to me to be wrong. Employers will, in the main, be well-informed and reasonably intelligent men. An employer can truthfully say that he does not know there was a trade board rate fixing wages at such a figure, and it is almost inevitable that a large number of workmen will not know there are wages boards, and will not, very often, know what these rates are.

The rates of minimum wages are changed from time to time. Probably five or six changes have been made since 1939. Workmen have, therefore, tremendous difficulties in establishing their claims at all. I put it to any member of this House how difficult it is going to be for the workman who is working with an employer in some rural part of Ireland for the last six years to go into court and cite for the justice the rate applicable to his employment at the different periods during the last six years, having regard to the fact that these rates have been changed from time to time. It is going to be a difficult thing, and I suggest that the workman should be facilitated in establishing his claim, rather than having it made more difficult for him to make it. This is one of the few places in which a Minister comes to the House and says that a law was passed a number of years ago, and that a number of people have evaded that law and that we must not be too hard on them.

That was the Minister's statement to the House. He mentioned a case where a workman had to recover £340, which would be tantamount to taking over the place, but that defence is never raised by the Minister for Industry and Commerce or the Minister for Finance when they seek to justify convictions involving, fines of, perhaps, £3,000 to £5,000, and the question of whether the man concerned is driven out of business or not is not permitted to influence the Minister's mind.

What happens here is that an employer knows quite well he is obliged by law to pay minimum wages, and feels happy getting away with paying less. If the minimum rate is 40/- and the employer gets away with paying only 37/6 because the workman accepts it, he is charmed at getting away with 2/6, because he feels he has something up on his neighbours, even though he might spend several times more than that 2/6 in other directions. It reminds me of the man who travels by train and manages to get out of the railway station without buying a ticket. Having escaped, he spends at the other end of his journey two or three times what would have bought him his ticket. That is what you are encouraging here.

The Minister ought to find some means of ensuring that not merely the workman will recover but that the workman will be entitled to recover arrears of wages due over other periods and steps should be taken by the Department to see that the money will be recovered. That is not being done. There was a return issued in the Dáil last February showing the number of inspections carried out over a period of seven years and the number of prosecutions and convictions. In the last couple of years they were infinitesimal. In 1944 there was only one conviction out of probably three or four prosecutions and the size of the fines inflicted was so small that it will act as an inducement to pay less than the minimum rates, an entirely unsatisfactory state of affairs, not merely unfair to the workman but to the other farmers who are conscientiously paying the full rates. I am totally opposed to the principle of this Bill and I propose to vote against it.

In regard to the question of placing a prohibition on the institution of proceedings after a certain date on which a man has left employment, I am in sympathy. A man who is not prepared to take proceedings, say, within two years after he has left the employment, ought to be barred. There ought to be some time in which proceedings should be instituted. I distinguish between the practice in this Bill as to the period in which arrears may be recovered. I have said that I propose to vote against the Bill and that is the only protest I can make at this stage.

Mr. Baxter

There is not a great deal to be said about this Bill but I confess that I would have expected Senator Duffy to proceed along a different line in his approach to the problems raised by the Bill itself. I have never thought the Agricultural Wages Act a satisfactory instrument. It may be more satisfactory after this Bill, but so far I confess I cannot see how it has benefited either employers or employees.

From the knowledge I have been able to glean about it, I feel that it has succeeded in cutting out more men from work on the land than it has succeeded in putting into employment. No doubt it is true that it has helped employees in many instances. They have been paid higher rates of wages in some counties anyhow, than they received before the passage of the Act. I would say that is notable in the Minister's own county in view of the figures we saw before the passage of this law. Two main points are being covered by the present Bill. I have some experience of the way the 1936 Act operated and the injustices perpetrated by it in the clauses which the Minister now seeks to amend.

Senator Duffy has suggested that few employees can truthfully say that they know the details of the fixed minimum wage. I can truthfully say that a great many employees have a better appreciation of it than their employers, and that the employees know more about their rights than the employers. If you want to meet a group of people in which there is colossal ignorance in regard to payments, go among the ordinary farmers of the country. Most of the farmers who have been prosecuted and persecuted in the courts under this Act were completely in ignorance of what the law was. I have knowledge of instances myself where sometimes employers were taken into court in respect of persons employed by them who are actually mentally defective. They have kept them all the time quite unaware of the fact that they could obtain exemption from the Agricultural Wages Board. They were brought to court and paid the penalty of their ignorance and kindness of heart, because that is really what it was. There is no use in suggesting that there is justice in a law that will operate like that. Truly the Minister is doing something to redress the burden of injustice that the original Act imposed. The other point made by Senator Duffy is that an employee cannot look for arrears of wages beyond a period of two years. I do not know whether Senator Duffy has lost contact with the country mentality, but you would be surprised how very wary and clever the agricultural workers can be in some of these matters. The agricultural worker can go into service, knowing right well what his rights are and not struggling very bitterly to get his rights, knowing that the law gives him protection. That has been the position in a number of cases up to the present. There is no excuse for the employer who will not pay his employee decently. I do not know just how much one is permitted to say on that, but I said in the beginning that this is a very ineffective instrument. One might call it a rule of thumb method of determining the relationship between employer and employee in regard to wages. It is not based on any solid facts. It is not based on the capacity of the farmer to pay, or the need of the labourer, on whether in the one instance the produce of the farm enables the farmer to pay or whether in the other instance the payment is adequate from the point of view of the maintenance of the worker, his family and his home.

I would have hoped that Senator Duffy would have proceeded to discuss the Bill from that angle, that no satisfactory relationship has been established. The Bill never purported to do that. I have tried to discover from the people who sit on the Wages Board how they proceed to determine wages and I have never got much enlightenment. I put it to the Minister that all of us are resting on our oars. There has got to be a completely new approach to the payment of wages to workers and the capacity of the industry to pay. I do not know how many members of the House have seen the scales of allowances which can be taken into account in paying agricultural workers. It will be seen from these scales that the farmer is entitled to put down 3d. against the agricultural worker's tea. One wonders how the farmer was able to manage tea for 3d. I think 3d. is the figure now, but perhaps it was 2d. or 2½d. some time ago. You can put butter, tea and bread down, but not one of the commodities that go to make the worker's meal can be purchased for the amount which is entered as the allowance against that commodity.

I am drawing the attention of the House to this in order to indicate that the whole approach to the regulation of the relationship between employer and employee is thoroughly unsound and unsatisfactory, and is not helping to add to the numbers employed on the land. It is regarded by a great many farmers as a very defective piece of mechanism. The Minister will have to face up to the responsibility of instituting some machinery whereby it will be possible to determine what is the minimum which any employee anywhere ought to obtain, so as to give him a standard of frugal comfort that will enable him to be a physically fit man to do his job. Having discovered that, the Minister has got to put the industry in a position to better that responsibility. I support this Bill because it is doing something to amend the faults of the original Act. In my view, the original Act has a great many faults and makes an entirely wrong approach to the whole problem of defining the relations between employers and employees. It would be much better for the employers and workers if we were organised in such a way that we could decide this matter ourselves. I suggest to Senator Duffy that the best approach is not to deride the farmers, and to point to them as a group of people who do not want to pay their debts, or who want to pay their workers much less than their service is worth.

Mr. Duffy

That suggestion was not made.

Mr. Baxter

I accept that. With regard to the problem of the labourer on the land and improving conditions, even for the farmer, I feel we have been brought to the stage that it is only by raising the standard of living for the agricultural labourers and putting the industry in a position to pay them the necessary wages, that the farmer will attain the status which he ought to have got long ago. If he has to make the case that he has got to provide so much for his agricultural worker, perhaps the rest of the community will be taught to realise that he has got to be provided with the wherewithal to do that.

Mr. Kingsmill Moore

I feel that I have not got a sufficiently intimate knowledge of agricultural matters to be able to speak with any authority on the different points raised by the last two speakers. There is, however, one small point which occurs to me as a lawyer. Under the Agricultural Wages Bill, agricultural wages are fixed at a certain sum. There is a contract made by law between the employer and workman. That contract is one which should be carried out by the employer. If the employer does not carry it out he can by the provisions of this Act be brought to book and made to pay the amount which the worker has been underpaid. But why should this obligation to pay be confined to two years? In an ordinary contract the amount that can be recovered is confined to a debt within six years. Where a contract is made by the provisions of a statute the period of limitation in law is 20 years. I could well see that it would be absurd to have a 20 years' period of limitation in a case like this, but if it turns out that a worker has been underpaid for a period of over two years, I cannot see why he should not be entitled to recover for the legal contractual period of six years the money which for one reason or another he ought to have been paid, but was not paid. There may be very good reasons, but prima facie, I do not see why he should be treated any worse in respect of his contract than any other person who has undertaken work for a definite sum, who has not been paid and goes to law to assert his rights.

Dr. Ryan

Senator Duffy said he thought my action was reactionary. I do not know what the Senator means by that. I think reactionary means a person who is not up to date. I am afraid we are very much behind in this country, because if we were to be really up to date it would mean practically that people would have to do their work and if they did not the Gestapo would get after them.

Mr. Kingsmill Moore

That is a horrible way of putting it.

Dr. Ryan

It is terrible, but it is the modern way.

Mr. Sweetman

That is not the definition according to the dictionary.

Dr. Ryan

I have not studied the dictionary definition.

Mr. Kingsmill Moore

I hope the Minister is not seriously prescribing that as the modern method.

Dr. Ryan

No, as the modern definition of the word "reactionary".

Mr. Kingsmill Moore

I beg pardon, I did not hear the word "reactionary".

Dr. Ryan

I am dealing with the word "reactionary" now. I am proud of being reactionary, because we do not do that. Perhaps Senator Duffy is not a reactionary. I do not know. Senator Duffy raised the point about convenience for the employee putting his case to the Minister rather than going to court, but the employee is in court in any case. The employee is actually in court claiming the wages that are due to him, that is, the difference between the wage he contracted for and the minimum wage. I am dealing with Section 2 now. The only change we are making as regards Section 2 is that we ask the district justice first to decide if it is agricultural work. If he decides that it is, he goes on to hear the claim. If he decides that it is not agricultural work, then the claim is rejected. I am only mentioning that to rebut Senator Duffy's point that it is inconvenient for a man to go to court.

Mr. Duffy

It is agreed I take it, that the workman would have to finance his case?

Dr. Ryan

No, I will deal with that, but first I make the point that he is not going to court on this particular issue. It is only an added issue and, therefore, it is not an extra inconvenience for the employee. I hold there are cases of more legal importance than anything else, and it is proper for the district justice to decide them. A case came before the High Court in 1942 and that court ruled that despite the definition given in the Act of what an agricultural worker is, it did not give the Minister power to decide on so technical a question of law as contract of service.

That was their decision, and I had to be very particular ever since about what I would give a decision on. It is better to leave the whole issue to the court to decide in future. Senator Duffy asked what is the rule with regard to the amount. I think the rule is that where a claim is under £25 it goes to the District Court, and where it is over £25 and under £300 it goes to the Circuit Court. I take it there is an appeal, if necessary, from that court to a higher one. The Senator also raised the point that the board would see to these matters. They do, of course. I have never heard of a case anywhere where an employee appealed to the board, saying he felt he was wrongly treated, that the board have not dealt with. The board made a large number of inspections during the last six or seven years and comparatively few cases came to court. The inference is that the inspector on the spot was able to convince the employer that he was doing wrong and that the employer accepted it and paid up the arrears. In such a case the inspector did not insist on the case going to court, because he felt that the employer was, perhaps, ignorant of the law. When he got things fixed up in an amicable way, he did not go to court. There were something like 52,000 cases inspected in the last seven years, 7,000 irregularities were found, and of these only about 50 cases were brought to court. That is why I say it must be taken that of these 7,000 cases practically all were believed by the inspectors to be due to misapprehension or ignorance and it was found that the employers are willing to make things right. Where the employee has a grievance or believes he has been badly treated, the board will institute proceedings and bear the necessary costs to get things right.

I do not agree with Senator Baxter. Perhaps if my speeches at the beginning were read, it would be seen that I had no great hopes from the Act but, personally, I was rather agreeably surprised by its results. It worked very much more smoothly than I ever expected. On the whole, when we look back on it, I think it was rather well-framed. First, you had these committees in the various areas, composed of representatives of employers and employees. They made recommendations to the board, which was composed of four representatives from the employers and four from the employees, with three neutral members and a chairman.

The legislation was framed in this way, that when the board dealt with the question of wages and the employers and employees agreed, that meant that it was an order of the board and nobody could question it further. Where it was impossible to get the employers and the employees to agree, the chairman made a ruling but he had the three neutral members to consult and support him. In fact, what we had was a system of arbitration. The chairman tried to get agreement between employers and employees. I should say that we had conciliation because the chairman tried to get agreement. We had conciliation in the first instance and arbitration afterwards. As far as I can remember, for the last seven years the chairman had never to dictate a decision. He was always successful in getting employers and employees to agree upon the minimum wage. When we look back on that fact we will have to agree that the legislation in this respect was very successful. The fact that there was only one conviction in the last 12 months does not prove very much.

Most Senators will agree that the great majority of agricultural workers are getting more than the minimum wage and it would be extremely difficult to get a worker to work for less. I am not surprised that there have been very few convictions. I have no doubt at all that there were contraventions of the Act in the beginning. If there should be, in the years to come, depression in agriculture again, we might have the same conditions prevailing. The board will have to be more vigilant but, at the moment, it has very little to do so far as that is concerned. Senator Kingsmill Moore told us that, under the present law, money due under contract can be recovered up to 20 years.

Mr. Kingsmill Moore

The period under an ordinary contract is six years and under the provisions of a statutory contract 20 years.

Dr. Ryan

So that, in the ordinary way, if this provision were not made, the period would be 20 years. It is a question of deciding what the number of years should be. I tried at the outset to impress on Senators that, in the interest of employer and employee, we should try to shorten the period. Senators who have the interest of the employee at heart will agree that, even amongst agricultural employees, there are some who might be described as "bright boys". They would be prepared to go to an employer when work would be hard to get and offer to work at 5/- less than the minimum rate. They would say that they did not believe that the Government should interfere in these matters but they would be aware that, after working for four or five years, they could recover the arrears of the balance of the minimum wage from the farmers. Consider the damage that they would do to their brother employees who were trying to get the best wage so as to rear their families properly. That sort of behaviour has a depressing effect on a whole area because the farmer who employs the man tells a brother farmer that he is not paying the minimum wage because he does not think that it is justified. The effect is that wages are depressed and the whole Act goes into abeyance in that particular district. I do not think that representatives of employees should countenance or encourage such conduct.

In the other House, I asked trade union leaders to say what they would do with a man in one of their unions who would accept less than the fixed wage. Suppose that the wage for carpenters is £4 10s. and that a carpenter, finding it difficult to obtain work, offers to work at £4 5s. If he went back to his union secretary after six or 12 months, would the union secretary say: "My poor man, we shall get your wages back for you"? Would he not rather say to him that he was the next thing to a blackleg and deserved no sympathy?

Mr. Duffy

In the meantime, he would try to recover the back money.

Dr. Ryan

Yes, but would not the union secretary like to have a thing like that reported to him as quickly as possible? He would hardly like to have it going on for 20 years. I think that the period of two years provided in the Bill is long enough and that it is in the interest both of employers and employees. On these area committees and on the board, representatives of the employees were as keenly in favour of this provision as representatives of the employers because they saw that, if they allowed these matters to drag on, they would have an adverse effect on those in whom they were interested.

Mr. Duffy

The Minister knows that, among certain sections of the agricultural workers, there is a great doubt as to the bona fides of those who represent them on those committees.

Dr. Ryan

I know that it is claimed by certain speakers that those men do not truly represent the agricultural workers, but it would be an extra ordinary thing if Senators were to give me credit for being so clever as to be able to pick 68 or 70 agricultural workers who have no interest whatever in the agricultural worker and who are completely on the side of the farmer. I may be a clever fellow but I am not able to do that, and I do not think that Senator Duffy should credit me with being able to do it.

Mr. Duffy

Some of them are substantial farmers.

Dr. Ryan

Some of them, but would the Senator claim that none of these men has an interest in the agricultural worker, that they are all on the side of the farmer and that they vote for what the farmer wants. I do not think that the Senator would seriously make that contention. I do not think that the Senator would contend that we could get unity on the board and on these committees in connection with this proposal if representatives of the agricultural workers seriously believed that it was not in the interests of those workers that this should be done.

Question put and agreed to.

Committee Stage fixed for first sitting day of next week.