INSTRUCTORS’ SALARIES

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27408, 22 July 1954, Page 9

INSTRUCTORS’ SALARIES

GOVERNMENT SCALE CRITICISED

(Hew Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, July 21.

The salary of an instructor in bootmaking for the Prisons Department—£645 —was compared with the salary of £530 for instructors in agriculture by the Dominion president (Mr John Andrew) in his address to the annual Dominion conference of Federated Farmers today. Mr Andrew, holding up a copy of an advertisement published in daily newspapers on May 11 this year, said that in it the Public Service Commission called for applications for the positions of instructor in agriculture and instructor in bootmaking for the Prisons Department. “The instructor in bootmaking is to start at £645, while the instructors in agriculture (with B.Agr. Sc. degree), are to start at £530,” Jie said. “In addition, the bootmaker instructor is to be given accommodation at a cost of £lO a year, plus 4s a day for meals for a single man, or a house allowance of £65 a year for a married man.

“This is how we regard the importance of our main industry. We have similar policies in respect to secondary industry. The old-established ones whose products enter into the cost-of-living index are compelled, with the protection of a small tariff, to compete with new industries completely protected by import control. “I am told that in the newer industries the protection is such that unskilled workers can be, and are, paid more than skilled workers in the older industries,” said Mr Andrew.