Les comités paritaires, organismes originaux et nécessaires Parity Committees, Original and Indispensable Institutions

Sommaire

Les comités paritaires existent dans la province de Québec depuis plus de vingt-cinq ans. L'auteur signale les résultats obtenus, les difficultés rencontrées et les imperfections de ce système. Il présente les suggestions qu'il croit opportunes pour les revaloriser.

Summary

In view of the abuses and weakness of an economy imbued of economic liberalism, the temptation is strong and the trend real to accept integral socialism as a last resort. It is possible, however, to avoid one and another with the edification of a system of professional organization. Now, we have, in the Province of Quebec, an organism which is at the basis of this kind of system: the Parity Committees.

The Parity Committees are born in our Province in 1934 from a law by which two groups or more of employers and employees who have agreed on labour and wage conditions in their proper trade, industry, commerce or occupation wheer they have acquired a preponderant significance and importance may ask the Lieutenant-Governor in Council to render obligatory to every establishment of the profession these conditions of labour and wages. The object of the parity comimititee is: a) to eliminate and attenuate the competition on the basis of the wages; b) to establish adequate wages; c) to regulate the profession concerned by the decree.

The Parity committees have obtained unquestionable results but have met also many difficulties, for instance:

1. the lost of interest on one hand for the employees or workers subjected to a decree towards the union by receiving through juridical extension favorable conditions of labour and wages and, on the other hand, an annoyance on the part of the employers for being in many cases subjected to both the Collective Agreement Act and the labour Relations Act;

2. the opposition from numerous employers to join the ranks of their Association on account of the decree not understanding its full significance or their mass entry in the association in order to block, by their majority, the renewals of the decree;

3. the difficulties in some cases to administer a decree efficiently or the impossibility to create new ones on account of the limitation of revenues as authorized by the law;

4. the abuses, often pointed out, from parity committees having large revenues;

5. also, the conflict of juridiction between parity committees as well as the presence of one or more parity committees plus the Minimum Wages Act in the same establishment.

To obviate these difficulties ore ought to a) think over both laws of the Collective Agreement Act and Labour Relations Act in order to alleviate the conflicts;

To reinforce the profession by granting it new and more powers in order to obtain a better efficiency from the parity committees;

to establish a kind of clearing house in order to permit to the small committees as well as to those which cannot be created presently to have the necessary revenues for a good administration;

and also, if one wishes to give the parity committees the importance required in a system of professional organization, to appoint a Deputy Minister whose fonctions would be to attend specifically to the parity committees.