Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/543

 NOTES AND MEMORANDA 521 for cokemen, and one for mechanics. They met once a fortnight, but had so much to do they were often six months in arrears with their work, and this was the only objection to them advanced by the men Mr. Lindsay Wood, on behalf of the coal owners, however, asked for legal power to compel the parties to comply with the joint committee's award by a pecuniary penalty, but he admitted the number of cases in which the workmen had refused to comply was small. On the whole, the conferences of the joint committees had made the relations of masters and men very harmonious. Mr. Wilson said: ' We have a perfect understanding between our employers and ourselves.' Similar results are reported of the Cleveland iron-mining industry, where a joint committee in this case without a paid or regular chairman has been in operation for nineteen years, and according to the evidence brought before the Commission, had saved that trade from strikes all that time, except once in 1874, and then the strike was in the cse of an owner who was not a member of the Employers' Association. A sliding scale existed in the Cleveland iron mines from 1879 to 1889 but was then given up, as in the Durham coal-mines, at the instance of the men. One of the men's representives, Mr. J. Toyn, gave three reasons for this step 1st, the base rate was considered too low; f2nd, the scale did not work quick enough in a rising market (and this was admitted by Mr. Hugh Bell, one of the iron masters); and 3rd, the Union lost half its members through nothing important being left to fight for; but this decrease of membership was attributed by another witness to bad times. Arbitration finds no fayour either with masters or men in Cleveland. The masters will not submit their affairs to persons without any technical knowledge of the business, and the men merely dislike it because it has always happened to go against them when it has been tried. The cotton industry in all its branches is remarkably free from serious grievances at present. The operatives put forward a number of witnesses, who were agreed that the trade they followed was one in which' employment was exceptionally regular throughout the year, that, wages were as high in it as the conditions of foreign competition would allow, and that workmen who belonged to it very seldom ended their days in the workhouse, because they were generally able to save something themselves, and to get some assistance from their family. Not less striking is the uniformity of the testimony given to the much improved and harmonious relations established between employers and employed through the ordinary operation of the organization of the two parties. Mr. Mawdsley, secretary of the Operative Cotton Spinners' Association, said there was now ' not the slightest trouble or friction' between them.. Mr Wilkinson, secretary of the Northern Counties Weavers' Association, stated that since 1884 that body had to do with twenty-three strikes, and in only two of them were the em- ployers concerned members of the Masters' Association, and the statement was confirmed by Mr. Rawlinson, secretary of the Masters'