STAFF LOSSES BY RAILWAYS

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29234, 18 June 1960, Page 14

STAFF LOSSES BY RAILWAYS

Reply To General Manager

Statements on the “alarming rate” at which the Railways Department was losing apprentices to private industry made by the General Manager of Railways (Mr A. T. Gandell) at the industrial development conference in Wellington and reported in "The Press” on Thursday have drawn criticism.

Mr Gandell said that from 1950 to 1956 "his department had lost about 45 per cent, of fully trained apprentices to private trade. He had no real answer to the problem had spoken to no-one who had. But as long as some private firms offered gold watches and free transport and “all these silly things we are going to have this trouble.”

After a special executive meeting yesterday “of the Addington branch of the New Zealand Railways Tradesmen Association, the secretary (Mr W. Flavell) released the following statemen't in reply to Mr Gandell’s reported remarks:—

“It has been our organisation’s contention that efforts to curb the shortage of tradesmen have always been of a stopgap nature, such as dilution and importation from other codntries. “No adequate provision for reasonable margins for skill and responsibility has ever been attempted. One of the most regrettable features of the loss of many of our best tradesmen is that they are going into semiskilled jobs bringing up to £2O a week.

“Finally, if outside industry is offering gold watches as an inducement. there is no reason why a national organisation such as the Railways Department could not do something better.”