The Press FRIDAY, JULY 28, 1933. City Council Wages.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20919, 28 July 1933, Page 10

The Press FRIDAY, JULY 28, 1933. City Council Wages.

In his presidential address to the Citizens' Association last night, Mr H. D. Acland particularly and rightly referred to the stubborn folly with which the Labour group on the City Council maintains municipal employees as a privileged section of the community and insists on paying a subsidy on relief workers' wages. It cannot be said too often or too plainly that in both these policies the council exceeds its functions and defies its duty. As for the first, it is sheltering a large number of steadily employed officers and labourers, the servants of the community, against such a fall in money income as is otherwise universal in the community; and since the cost of living has fallen, these beneficiaries enjoy, through the increased purchasing power of their fixed money incomes, an effectual increase of wages or salaries. They do so, of course, at the direct expense of the ratepayers and indirectly of all other citizens. Robbing Peter to pay Paul has never been considered fair or wise; but when Peter is already in difficulties —or he would not be so behindhand with his rates—while Paul is safe, the process begins to recall the activity of the less respectable kind of pirates, whom it pleased to add insult to injury. As for the second policy, of subsidising relief wages, it has never been seriously pretended that it did not stultify itself by more narrowly limiting the number of men whom the council could relieve; but if this were not so, if it did in fact extend the amount of relief given without reducing its spread, the subsidy would still be objectionable, being an unwarranted tax upon the ratepayers, levied as it is to assert a political party's difference with the Unemployment Board and the Government. All of this is the more deplorable when considered in relation to the council's action on Monday night, when £ 15,000 of , the Municipal Electricity Department's funds was transferred to the general revenue. Had wages and salaries been reduced, in a measure no greater than the fall in the cost of living justifies, and had the subsidy been aoandoned, very little further saving would have been necessary tc balance the accounts; and the interests of the department and its consumers would not have been jeopardised. Nothing has better illustrated the dangers of surrendering municipal affairs to the disposition of a political faction. Nothing has given the Citizens' Association a clearer direction to its duty of educating the electorate, which in the end can be saved from such dangers only by itself.