Colonel NEWMANasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether the Industrial Court has recently been permitted to hear an appeal from His Majesty's dockyard manipulative workers against wage cuts, which was dismissed by that court; whether up to now the Treasury has refused to allow a similar appeal from the professional and clerical temporary women civil servants to go before the Industrial Court; and upon what grounds this distinction has been made, in view of the fact that the latter appellants have in many cases to support others on even lower wages than those paid to the former?
§ Mr. BALDWINThe answer to the first and second parts of the question is in the affirmative. As stated by my predecessor in this House on the 27th July last, the Industrial Courts Act, as applicable alike to workmen in outside industry and to civil employés of the Crown, provides for arbitration by consent of both parties. The circumstances of the two cases referred to by my hon. Friend and of the proceedings which led up to a request for arbitration were widely dissimilar: and I can discover no reasonable foundation for an assumption that, because in one of the two cases it was decided to agree to arbitration, the same procedure should necessarily or appropriately have been adopted in the other case.