GLOVE TRADE

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 221, 14 June 1930, Page 17

GLOVE TRADE

End of Safeguarding GLOOMY PROSPECT The Yeovil sheepskin glove-making industry, which for three years lias been enjoying the greatest prosperity under safeguarding, has been thrown into consternation at the prospect of the abolition of the duties under Mr. Snowden’s Budget proposals. Before the imposition, of the duties, tho industry suffered severely from foreign competition, with consequent chronic unemployment and low wages, due to the fact that thousands of the operatives were ou part time. To-day the trade enjoys 300 per ceut. employment, aud there is no industrial unrest

Tho workpeople are paid on a piecework basis, the men averaging £3/10/for a 47-hour week and the women about 31/-, for a 41-hour week. Some skilled hands make £5 a week. Exports have increased by 10 per cent., despite higher tariffs abroad, and manufacturers have refrained from raising the price of sheepskin gloves to the public. Into this smoothly working piece of industrial machinery Air. Snowden has . thrown his bomb. It is the considered opinion of several leading manufacturers that the withdrawal of the duties will spell disaster to Yeovil aud the countryside. Mr. Lionel 'Whitby, of Whitby Bros., one of the oldest firms in the town, says that a feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty is apparent throughout the trade at the bare prospect of tlie abolition of the duties. Severe Unemployment “Such an action, in my opinion, is certain to result in very severe periods of unemployment during the next two or three years,” Mr. Whitby said. “I should not be surprised.il' some of the smaller manufacturers were driven out of business altogether, and trade generally throughout the town aud district will be dealt a most serious blow.’’ Mr. Whitby added that there had been no reduction of wages, with the exception of certain war bonuses, since the end of the war, and wages were more than double those of pre-war days for a 54-hour week. In the glove trade, he said, wages were an important factor as they represented a third of the cost of the finished article. With the flooding of the market with cheap foreign gloves and the consequent check on home production—to say nothing of the loss of the export trade, now slowly gaining ground—the present satisfactory wage position would be dangerously affected, he added. Figures showing the rapid rise to prosperity since the imposition of the duties were given by Mr. S. O. Clothier, a former Mayor of Yeovil and head of one of tho largest skeepskin glove manufacturing concerns in the district. Whereas, from the beginning of 1921 until the end of 1925, the number of pairs made dropped as lbw as 309,897, that number increased between the beginning of 1926 and the end of 1929 to 617,721.

It is significant that during the Safeguarding period imports dropped from 655,975 palps to 546,900 pairs, and last year, for the first time for a long period, homo production was well ahead of the import trade.

Foreigners Waiting.

“The industry’s case for Safeguarding was carefully considered by an impartial tribunal,” said Mr. Clothier. “Yet these duties, in all probability, will he taken off without auy kind of examination of the conditions under which the trade is carried on, or what effect such action will have on the economic position of the district. The full effect of abolition will be felt when we come to ask for spring orders next year. Our foreign competitors— France, Italy, and Czecho-Slovakia—-are only waiting their opportunity to flood the market, and the result will be that thousands of workers will be put on short time and large numbers thrown out of employment altogether."

The National Union of Glovers, to which the majority of tile operatives belbng, is alarmed at the threat to the present prosperity of its members, and is taking steps to curtail as far as possible the number of fresh apprentices entering tho trade in anticipation of severe depression in the coming year.