Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/233

A NEW PROVINCE FOR LAW AND ORDER 197 applied in the case of women. If women are put to work more suited for men, as that of a blacksmith, or even to work for which men are equally suited, the women must get a man's minimum.^^ Directors of Industry The Court does not ignore, however, the increasing demand of employees for some voice as to the conditions of working, the un- easy feeling that the employers, or rather their foremen, have an autocratic power which is too absolute. Wages and hours are not everything, A man wants to feel that he is not a tool, but a human agent finding self-expression in his work. The Court tries, therefore, to encourage by all the means in its power the meeting of representatives of the unions with representatives of the em- ployers. Such meetings produce a good effect, even when the employers adhere to their methods, giving their reasons. For- tunately there is no diflSculty as to recognition of the unions. The unions have come and have come to stay. Our act could not be worked without unions. One of the chief objects of the act is, imder section 2, "To faciHtate and encourage the organisation of representative bodies of employers and employees, and the sub- mission of industrial disputes to the Court by organisations." Now the act ^ enables the Court to appoint "Boards of Reference," and such boards involve opportunities for meeting for discussion of methods and alleged grievances. The difficulties which the Court has to face as to such boards appear in a passage in a judg- ment of last year, a passage which I take the liberty of setting out: "The most serious difficulty that I see in the agreements and in this award is the absence of the provision for a Board of Reference — a Board in which the employer and the employed could take counsel to- gether for the pxupose of dealing with any grievances which employees allege and which the directors and managers, owing to their remoteness from the stress of actual operations, cannot realise. It is one of the signs of the times, of which employers would do well to take heed, that the workers are gravely dissatisfied, because they have no voice whatever in the regulation of the conditions under which they spend so much of their lives, that their opinions as to the possibility of preventing im- necessary hardship are not to be treated as being of more account than " Fruit-growers, 6 Com. Arb. 61, 71 (1912). ** § 40 a.