The Poor Must Stay at Home
The first thing that the Catering Wages Commission uncovered, in its recently published report on the operation in the hotel industry of the Catering Wages Act, was a state of confusion such as private enterprise could hardly have created without Govern- mental assistance Side by side with a fantastic arrangement for applying rigid rules to at least 70,000 miscellaneous establishments, ranging from vast London hotels down to boarding-houses whose very number is uncertain, go regulations carried into such detail that calculations involving sixty-fifths of a penny have to be observed by licensed establishments. Insufficient attention has been paid to the exceptional circumstances of seasonal, rural and Scottish hotels. The attempt to relate tips to statutory remunera- tion—to relate the intangible to the unvariable—has failed. The attempt to discover the views of proprietors of hotels and small boarding-houses on wage regulations and proposals has hardly begun. The board which is supposed to deal with the affairs of unlicensed establishments has never seemed likely to cope with the task. The setting up of wages board machinery has been delayed. Even such elementary facts as that voluntary wage agreements are a useful device (which the trade unions might have been expected to insist upon from the start) appear to have been forgotten, so that it is necessary for it to be pointed out that such things work very well in Switzerland. Such utter confusion must be very expensive. Added to the increased wage costs which are already weighing down clubs and restaurants, the avoidable cost of ineffi- ciency is producing a situation in which fewer and fewer people will find themselves able to stay or to eat away from home.
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