SHOPPING ON SATURDAYS

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29220, 2 June 1960, Page 17

SHOPPING ON SATURDAYS

Shop Assistants 9 Views Sought

A secret ballot to determine whether New Brighton shop assistants are in favour of Saturday shopping will be conducted by the Avon branch of the New Zealand Social Credit League next Saturday.

The organiser of the ballot will be the Social Credit candidate for Avon in the next General Election (Mr G. M. Edmonds). At a public meeting held recently to explain the Social Credit election policy, Mr Edmonds said that the ballot would be a followup of a recent statement in support of the Saturday trading, a practice which was now threatened by review. The ballot will be taken in two parts. Part-time employees who work only on Saturdays and fulltime employees who now have Wednesdays off and work on Saturdays wiD have separate votes. The counting of votes would be done by local Justices of the Peace in a New Brighton office and the result should throw some light on the Saturday shopping question, Mr Edmonds said. More than 50 per cent of the shop owners had been approached and had given their approval of the ballot, he added. Whether persons should be allowed to shop on Saturdays at New Brighton was one of the trials of strength between the bureaucrats and the Social Credit principle of freedom for the individual. he said. Neither the Labour nor the National Party had resoonded to a challenge to declare their exact policy on the Saturday shopping question.

As long as New Brighton remained open on Saturdays there would be a chance of freedom spreading to other areas and of suburban shops being exempt from the present ridiculous restrictions, he said.

Mr Edmonds said that the proposal for a secret ballot was purely a domestic matter on the part of the Avon branch and was not in any way connected with any policy of the New Zealand Social Credit League. Emphasising that the Brighton issue was a test case, Mr Edmonds said that if Saturday shopping was stopped it would never be re-introduced.