THE CATERING WAGES REGULATIONS
Sm,—Your article, Hamstrung Hotels, draws attention to the disastrous effect of the above on hotels. They are equally disastrous for the hotel employees, who, on their account, have lost their employment and many of them their quarters. But the public are not generally aware of the very wide sphere over which they are claimed to be enforceable.
Those who enforce them claim, for instance, that they apply to small clubs, where a drink or tea can be obtained by members, and to offices, where cups of tea are provided for the staff, though in both cases the provision of such refreshment is an incidental and in the first case a casual activity. These officials apparently interpret Section 1(2) of the Act as meaning that, when any food or drink is obtainable, its provision is a main activity of a " part of the undertaking," which undertaking employs any worker who performs any work in this connection, though the "part" has no entity and employs nobody. This extended interpreta- tion of " part of an undertaking " appears to be far removed from what was intended, but it spreads the blight of these Regulations widely.. For instance, it must cause small clubs to close with consequent unemployment and in many cases loss of their home to their stewards, many of whom are fit for no other job. And it presumably brings under these Regulations all domestics in private households who boil a tea-kettle or wash a cup or glass in the course of their work, for a household is as much " an undertaking" within the meaning of the Act as the small clubs, to which it is claimed that these Regulations apply.
The nearness of the General Election may temporarily restrain the enforcement of these Regulations in private households, but the public would be safer if this threat were permanently removed—and soon. This overstretching of the sphere of the Act appears to benefit nobody but those for whom it provides comfortable jobs at the cost to others of their jobs br homely amenities.—Yours faithfully, Cur BONO ?
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