PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION G. 537 



8. LABOUR STATISTICS. 



By Gerald Lightfoot, M.A., Barrister-at-Law, of the Common- 

 wealth Bureau of Census atid Statistics. 



1. Introduction. 



Some explanation is due to members of the Association for the 

 somewhat unusual nature of tliis paper, for it has none of the 

 paraphernalia of statistical tables or analyses, and it does not con- 

 tribute directly to statistical or sociological knowledge. It is a 

 paper written rather from an objective than a subjective point of 

 view, its aim being to draw attention to the need which has 

 hitherto existed for an extension of certain official statistics in 

 Australia, and to explain the work now being carried out by the 

 Labour and Industrial Branch of the Commonwealth Statistical 

 Bureau. The preliminary work of organizing that branch has re- 

 cently been completed by Mr. Knibbs, the Commonwealth Statis- 

 tician, and it is through the courtesy of that gentleman that I am 

 able to furnish the information given in this paper. After deal- 

 ing with certain general considerations, I propose to point out 

 several respects in which our Australian statistics have in the past 

 been deficient; then to dwell briefly on the importance from the 

 stand-point of problems of national urgency of these defects being 

 remedied, to explain shortly the nature and scope of the standard 

 investigations which the new branch is designed to carry out, and 

 to indicate the directions which further developments may reason- 

 ably be expected to take. 



Students of political and economic questions, the cost of living, 

 and wage theories, as well as those who are engaged in the prac- 

 tical application of Arbitration Court and Wages Board Acts have 

 for long been hampered in their work by a lack of reliable infor- 

 mation as to many vital questions which have grown out of the 

 progress of economic and industrial organization. In the past our 

 statistical officers have devoted their attention mainly to certain 

 lines of investigation, such as the movements of population, vital 

 statistics, transport and communication, finance, and the quantity 

 and value of production, but have not to any considerable extent 

 gone into the question as to how the value of that production is 

 distributed, or as to how the economic and social conditions of the 

 masses of the community have been affected by the growth which 

 is evidenced on all hands. The social life of working men, the 

 conditions of working men's families, the distribution of wages, 

 co-operation, and profit-sharing, prices, and cost and conditions 

 of living, the effect of operations under the various Arbitration 

 Court and Wages Board Acts, industrial accidents, changes in 

 rates of wages and hours of labour, employment and unemploy- 

 ment, the relation between nominal wages and effective earnings. 



