OUT OF WORK.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 81, 7 April 1926, Page 9

OUT OF WORK.

A WOMAN'S EXPERIENCES.

(By FIFTY-ODD.)

Fifty and out of work. Fifty? Well, ■-say fifty-odd. Not sixty. Oh, no, or I'd be "swearing my immortal soul away" as Mark Twain says, to prove I had been thirty years in the colony (or is it twenty-five) "to secure the pension. Perhaps. ! "But how comes it," asks one lady, "that you want work?" "Well, er, its this way—l do." "But old—cr — women ought not to want jobs—.. "No, but, then you see lethal chambers are not fashionable in New Zealand yet." Needless to say I didn't get a job there. It's lovely in Queen Street on an early February morning. Plenty of room to look about, admire the scenery and the architecture, cross the roads, examine the pedestrians and the shops. Pretty girls trotting along to work. Silk stockings and fancy cut shoes may be vn —everything, but they look charming at eight o'clock in the morning. A motor car, loaded with flowers, boxes of them. A sea in the distance like the grey bosom of a swan. A perfect skya busy sun, a cool breeze, great generous shadows from the big buildingswell, these are some of the compensation of being out of work on a lovely February morning. "Hundreds of women out of work," says one employment bureau. "Scores," I' say another. Well, a local doctor thought so when he went into his waiting room one evening. His wife had just 'advertised for a house-worker (nice light job for refined lady.) His waiting room 'was chock-a-block with fair ladies wearing a worried air—for one wild moment he thought it was a brand new epidemic had broken out. It was. They all wanted the job.

".But, my dear," (this is what I heard or thought I heard—l am deaf in one ear and can't hear very well in the other), -said the registry lady to an out-of-worker, "how can you be so pushed when you can afford such a beautiful dress?" "But my dress is old; it is shabby; it is dreadful in the sunlight. It is one of my trousseau frocks—a left over from my honeymoon." I listened a bit more. It was an old story.- A run-away husband, two children to support. New Zealand caught hubby in Australia to make him shell out; then he died. I hope she got the job she went after. In all her pitifnlness she was brave. A mother fighting for her young. She had only 5/ hard cash between her and want.

The charitable ladies too are pathetic. They find plenty of women eager for work, but not enough work to go round. And the women-out-of-workers are not all like one party' I heard about. A business man said to mc, "What's Mrs. So and So want work for? Her husband's in regular work." "But then," I reminded him, "the lady wants the right to burn her shabby clothes, and wear silk stockings—and silk costs —. Anyway, she wants the financial right to wear 'em."

Well, she got the good job' she was after. Perhaps she may have the wisdom to save tne omer tor the time when she's fifty-er-odd.