WHAT IS THE GOAL?

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1023, 12 January 1911, Page 4

WHAT IS THE GOAL?

The demand of the Carpenters' Union for, a working week of only five eight-hour days will set many people asking the' question that has already been asked so often—"Where is the agitation for shorter hours going to stop?" Probably no'one, not even the Labour leaders themselves, could "give a definite answer. When the question was a.sked. by the President of tho Arbitration Court a few months ago, a prominent trade union secretary repeated tho familiar assertion that Somebody had calculated that if everybody worked six. hours a day nobody need work more. Pressed by his Honour to say. whether the granting of a'six-hour day would put an ond to tho agitation, this particular advocate of

more pay for less work was not prepared to say that it would. His answer was vague. The fact, of course, is that the demands of organised Labour arc based, not upon any sound calculation of economic possibilities, but upon the desire to obtain for the worker more money or more leisure than he now has. And the desire seems to grow by what it feeds on. Each concession is followed by a furthcr.dcmand. A ten-hour day, now regarded with horror as a relic of barbarism, surviving only in the. benighted older lands, was once - rejoiced in as a boon. The oight-hour day, in its turn, was long celebrated as the special glory of Australasia, and when the Saturday, half-holiday bccamc usual, the four hours docked from the last day of' the were distributed over the others. This custom of making up for the half-holi-day was gradually dropped, and now the eight-hour day generally means a forty-four-hour week: The action of the carpenters, in asking for a fortyhour week is simply the next step in tho same direction.

But will' not the other Labour bodies, before- deciding to ■ follow them, consider whether the direction should not be changed 1 Have we not, in the progressive deduction of working hours, reached the point beyond which we cannot go without a marked falling : off in efficiency and in output ? If so, it is time to call a halt, for surely'nobody will deny that efficicncy makes the worker in every way a happier and better man; or that, when more wealth is 'produced, there is moro to distribute. And cannot organised Labour even yet rise to a. truer conception of .work than to regard it all'as. k necessary evil of which everybody should have a little because it is necessary,, and nobody should .have much bc'cause it is an evil 1 Lot mere soulless drudgery, by all means, be reduced to a minimum, but a large part • of. the world's work, though it , touches drudgery on the one side, may also partake more or less of'the nature of craftsmanship, which is almost art. If workmen took more'pride, in their work thev would have fewer grievances against their employers. And even-plain, hard toil has its merits.