The Secretary for the colonies is aware that there is no such clause in the agreement. The point is engaging attention, Dr. Drummond Shiels, the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, said in the House of Commons this afternoon, when Mr. Will Thorne, the veteran Labour leader asked whether his attention had been called to the fact that the convention regulating the transit of the mineral oil of the Iraq Petroleum Company through the territory of Palestine contained no clause for safeguarding fair wages and labour conditions or for labour legislation under the convention, and what steps did he intend to take with a view to rectifying the omission.
We are going into the matter now, Dr. Shiels added, when Mr. Thorne put a further question whether he would do his level best to see that Arabs and Jews should have the minimum rate of pay while putting down this pipe tract.
The convention shows how anxious the British authorities in Palestine are to be as accommodating as possible to induce the company to carry the pipe line over Palestine territory and have it terminate in the Haifa Bay, Palestine Labour circles complained (reported in the J.T.A. Bulletin of February 13th.) immediately the terms of the convention became known. Palestine Labour is perturbed over the fact, it was stated, that the provision with regard to employment of Palestine Labour is not qualified by any demand for the protection of the labourer, such as a fair wage clause or insurance. If the convention were one which required the ratification of the British Parliament, it was argued, the rights of the workers would not have been so disregarded.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
