HC Deb 27 July 1896 vol 43 cc724-5

(1.) No association or body of employers or workmen (whether registered as trades unions or not) shall, unless they have mutually agreed to some scheme for discussing all disputes and differences before resorting to a strike or lockout, subsidise or support any members who may lock out their workpeople or any members who may leave their employment on strike, unless and until such time as the respective officials of such associations or bodies shall have met and discussed the matters in difference and reduced into writing the grounds of complaint, demand, or matter in dispute. (2.) In case the officials of any such association or body shall, on an application of the other, neglect to meet and discuss the matters in difference, then the association or body so neglecting shall be bound by the above restriction, but the other association or body shall be freed from such restriction in respect to subsidising or supporting members as and from the time when the strike or lock-out took place. He said that the Bill had been greatly altered in the Standing Committee. It was now entirely confined to the voluntary settlement of trade disputes. The object of his clause was to give employers and workpeople an opportunity, before the Board of Trade interfered, to exercise their own initiative and formulate their own scheme. But he should not now press the clause. If the Bill needed Amendment, there would he ample opportunity during the life of the present Parliament.

MR. ASCROFT moved in the title of the Bill (" A Bill to make better provision for the settlement of trade disputes,") to insert, after the words "provision for the," the words "prevention and."

* SIR C. DILKE

said that if the Amendment were agreed to by the Government, he would not oppose it, but he thought the words would seem very objectionable to the working classes, though they had no operative force.

THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF TRADE (Mr. G. T. RITCHIE,) Croydon

agreed to the objection of the right hon. Bart, but he did not think it necessary to resist the Amendment.

Amendment agreed to.

Clause 1,—