10.1 Applying the cut

The decision to cut wages did not immediately take effect across the totality of the Court's awards. Except for the applicants in the main proceedings, employers had to apply for the reduction clause to be inserted into their awards. Such applications were being made throughout 1931, and a set of applications was granted as late as January 1932. I do not know the numbers of workers subject to the wage cut at specific times, but clearly the process of enforcing it was protracted.

There were a number of instances in which the reductions in the price index took it below the levels allowed for in the existing adjustment tables. By inserting new bands of index numbers, the Court allowed the basic wage to fall below the previous minima. There were also cases where the Court was asked by employers to insert automatic-adjustment clauses into awards which lacked them. These were awards in which the adjustment clauses had been omitted by agreement. In one such case, for storemen and packers, Beeby refused to insert an adjustment clause on the ground that the agreed wage rates may have reflected the absence of an adjustment provision (Storemen and Packers' case 30 CAR 467). In another, about maltsters, Dethridge said: ‘The employers thought it convenient not to have the adjustment clause, and, throughout the last ten or eleven years, the parties, thinking it suitable for themselves, have done without an adjustment clause in their agreements or awards, and I do not think that I should introduce one now to the detriment of the employees’ (Variation—Maltsters (Victorian Award) 30 CAR 702).