Enforcing a Wage Agreement How to ensure, subject to reasonable
safeguards, that wage rates accepted by the bulk of an industry shall not be undercut and broken down by competitors playing a lone hand, has always been it main task under the Trade Boards Acts ; and very satisfactorily, on the whole, has it been discharged. Why could not the weaving section of the Lancashire cotton industry, when confronted with exactly this problem, be content to solve it along similar lines ? Why invent instead the far more cumbrous precedure under the Cotton Manu- facturing. Industry (Temporary Provisions) Act ? These are questions difficult to answer without allowing for the cotton industry's ingrained conservatism and for that quality in it which Lancashire calls " independence," but which too often reveals itself as an expensive un- willingness to learn from other people. However, not without some creaks and groans, the new machinery has moved to its third stage. This is the appointment by the Minister of Labour of a board of three to examine the rates desired and agreed upon by the majority of employers and employed in the industry. If the three find that the rates should be enforced in the rest of the Mills, the Minister may order accordingly. But their finding will be of no effect unless unanimous ; and before reaching it they must (quite properly) listen to every conceivable critic and objector that the industry can produce.
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