WORK FOR BOYS

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 59, 2 December 1933, Page 16

WORK FOR BOYS

Whose Responsibility?

LABOUR COUNCIL’S VIEW

The recently-published report of the Wellington Chamber of Commerce on bov employment is adversely criticised bv Mr. John Tucker in a letter to the editor. Writing on behalf of the Wellington Trades and Labour Council, ne states:—The chamber, having definitely and in full accord disagreed with the fundamental points raised in the New Zealand Technical School Teachers’ Association’s report of May last, and having made certain statements as to the standard of living, their views demand public consideration. The first noint made by tee chamber is that the onus of finding employment for boys should not be on the State. Well, where should it be? And what are the true duties of the State? The State demands, the registration of the day the boy is born, and mace, his education to a certain age, and a true registration of his death. In case of war breaking out the State can commandeer his sei-vice and even his life for his country. Are we to be stupidly persuaded that the State has no responsibility toward its future manhood? If this is the frame of mind to be fostered by our commercial men, well, God help commercialism and New Zealand. Commercialism clamours for State protection and lives and thrives within its mighty arms. Yet the Wellington Chamber of Commerce would leave the boy alone to his own and his helpless unemployed parents’ devices. When he is a baby and of school age, they admit there is no barm in the State watching over him, but when he comes of industrial and commercial use, well, let him loose and helpless. Such an act. we would be made believe, is the best for the State, the boy, and industry. This report is destructive criticism, devoid of constructive thought. Private enterprise has utterly failed to employ the boy at any value as a national whole, and the number it has absorbed it has penalised with an unrighteous pay. The second point should be shouted from the housetops of New Zealand, viz., the Inculcation into the mind of the boy by the process of education, that the unskilled man or boy is not “eir titled either by natural law or under principles of justice to the luxuries of life.” Natural law is no respecter of persons, and provides for all on equal terms, and the principles of justice are embodied in the rights. of man to be treated as man and not as a commercial tool. That they are not entitled to the “fullness, of the earth” which t'he Lord has provided for all, are the ethics of commercial men after nearly two thousand years of Christian teaching. One wonders whether the devil is not already let loose upon earth. Everyone cannot be skilled, and even if it was so, they couldn’t, all be employed in skilled industries. There must be hewers of wood and carriers of water in a nation, and because they are such they should not be put on the animal plane, nor made to roam the world for a bare existence. They are made in the image of God' quite as much as the commercial man or the skilled worker.

If the attitude taken up by the Chamber of Commerce toward the training and educating of the boy to be skilled is. adopted, then he will never become skilled, and by a process of class pride and selfishness he will be doomed to a bare existence ration, and debarred from, seeing or enjoying the wonders and fullness of creation. Can this be the fullness of life Christ spoke of, and which he came to give the world ?