'Family Man Needs £l5 Take-Home Pay’

Press, Volume C, Issue 29691, 8 December 1961, Page 8

'Family Man Needs £l5 Take-Home Pay’

The average fortnightly take-home pay of railwaymen was now £22 10s and for a man with a wife and perhaps two children it was an economic impossibility to pay his way, said Mr A. E. Armstrong, secretary of the Canterbury branch of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants at a lunchtime meeting of railwaymen yesterday. Mr Armstrong said no man could maintain a wife and family on less than £l5 a week take-hoene pay. The meeting was organised by the Canterbury branch of the A.S.R.S. to protest against recent wage rises granted railwaymen, and to express dissatisfaction with present pay rates compared with the general cost of living. Speakers were introduced by the chairman of the branch. Mr G. Finlayson. They were Messrs Armstrong. F. L. Langley, president of the Canterbury district council of the Federation of Labour. R. Fergus, assistant secretary of the Lyttelton Waterside Workers’ Union, and P. M. Veduch. assistant secretary of the Canterbury Shop Assistants’ Union. •‘Much is said about the overtime handed out. but the fight has got to be for a living wage for a 40-hour

week.” Mr Armstrong said. “There is a struggle by tens of thousands of men and women to work overtime to pay their way today. If Parliamentarians can improve their salaries overnight. surely they have a damned cheek to go to the rank and file of working men and women trying to live on £ll a week and tell them they have to economise.” Mr Armstrong said. The only answer to “a rapacious, cruel, and ridiculous Government” was a mass, sensible representation on the cost of living, he said. The workers must decide to band together, and tell the Government in no uncertain terms that they would not stand any further reductions in the standard of living. It was the Federation of Labour’s policy to organise the workers into a strong and effective movement to win back a decent standard of living for a 40-h’our Vreek, said Mr Langley. Any prosperity working men had enjoyed had been a result of overtime being forced on them more and more, Mr Langley said. "We lost our 40-hour week standard during the war, and it’s our job to fight to get it back,” he said. The meeting was part of the “mass protest” decided on by the Federation of Labour against the ever-increas-ing cost of living, said Mr Langley. Several such meetings had already been held in Auckland, and more would shortly be held in Wellington and Dunedin, he said. The meeting passed three resolutions, one supporting the federation’s application for a general wage increase, one protesting to the Government against the increase in State house rents and electricity charges, and the third urging the Government to pursue “a far more vigorous policy of international trade to offset Britain's entry into the E.E.C.”