RELIABLE WORKERS

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 60, 4 December 1937, Page 10

RELIABLE WORKERS

Chinese In Malayan Tin Industry

It. hardly needs the assistance of such pictures as "The Good Earth” to prove what dogged workers the Chinese arc, and have always been. Those who went to the war are aware of the part the Chinese contingent played behind the lines. Wherever there was a big job to do —trench cutting, and earth displacement, bag-filling, and so on, the Chinese workers were untiring and unfailing. Mr. Khoo Teik, a Chinese barrister from Singapore, who is interested in some of the tin mines of Malaya, says that the labour in those mines is practically all Chinese, not. Malayan as one might think. Some of the other native races will work at intervals, but the Chinese work steadily day in and out all the year round, and seldom give tiny trouble to their employers. Normally they receive about. 1/8 a day working on the dredging claims for tin. As evidence that tlie Chinese is always a reasonable num, Mr. ’Teik stated Hint in 1930 and 1931, when the price of metals ajid most other products slumped in the world markets, tin receded in price nearly 50 per cent., and it was patent on the face of it that many of the mining companies could not keep going while paying the same wages. The Chinese labourers saw that the position was desperate for the companies, and accepted wages as low as 6d. a day, and found their food out of that, in order to keep the mines going. In Malaya most of the mines are dredging claims, the earth being dealt with from a floating dredge, which cuts into the banks just as New Zealand gold dredges do. The spoil runs away down a sluice anil the tin sinks to the bottom, just in the same manner as does gold. There are also good goldfields, showing good results over a period of years, in the Pahang district.