192-2.] Report of Committee on Trade Boards. 195 



grade of worker in the industry. This rate of wages should 

 approximate to the subsistence level in the place where the 

 workers live and which the trade can bear. Eates of wages fixed 

 on this principle should, in the Committee's opinion, continue 

 to be enforceable with all the authority of the law. Having thus 

 secured for all the workers in a particular trade a legal subsist- 

 ence wage, the Committee consider that the fixing of special 

 rates of wages for more skilled classes of workers in the trade 

 should be a matter for agreement between the employers' and 

 workers' sides of the Trade Board, who should come to fcheir 

 decisions in these matters without the help of the " appointed " 

 members . 



The Committee further make an important recommendation 

 that these special rates of wages, when fixed, should not be 

 automatically enforceable by law, but that the Trade Bond 

 should have power, if the two sides agree, to ask the Minister 

 of Labour to confirm such rates on the principle laid down in the 

 Corn Production Acts (Repeal) Act, which means that the con- 

 firmed rates would become an implied part of the terms of 

 contract of all the workers concerned, and would be enforceable 

 only by civil proceedings taken by the workers themselves (and 

 not, as in the case of the subsistence minimum wage, by quasi 

 criminal proceedings taken by the Government). 



In examining the question of permits of exemption the Com- 

 mittee point out that the present Trade Board Acts do not provide 

 for permits being issued to a " slow worker," i.e., the person 

 who, while not subject to any infirmity or physical injury, is 

 yet incapable, owing to some constitutional defect or to age or 

 some other cause, of earning the minimum wage fixed for the 

 ordinary worker of his class. In the Committee's opinion the 

 power of a Trade Board to grant permits of exemption should 

 not be confined to cases of physical or mental infirmity, but 

 should be widened to include incapacitv from any cause.' The 

 Committee add that in view of the unavoidable delay in con- 

 sidering applications for permits, Trade Boards should have 

 power m granting permits to make them operative from the date 

 of application. 



Another very interesting recommendation of the Committee is 

 that Trade Boards should have power to fix a series of minimum 

 rates to come into operation contingently on the oeenrrsenee of 

 specific (vvnts. This power obviously would be v rv useful to 

 a Board which had decided on the principle of basic rates of 

 wages and which would, having once dealt with the matter, be 



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