THE LABOUR REPORT.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 95, 19 October 1909, Page 6

THE LABOUR REPORT.

The annual report of the Labour Department is as usual a very interesting document, and its tone is more hopeful than on the present occasion it was natural to expect. One reason for this surprising cheerfulness is that the report is six months behind the times. In the case of an annual report a six months' delay is a very long one, but it >'s hardly necessary to say that the officers of the department are not to blame. It is the prorogation of Parliament from June, to October that has put all these departmental reports out of date, for it delayed the date of their presentation for more than three months without extending the period covered beyond the close of the last financial year. Thus, though the Labour report appears about the middle of October, it is dated the 3rd July, and it speaks as from the 31st March. At the close of the period which the report covers the worst had yet to come. The winter was not yet in sight, and nobody then supposed either that relief works would be necessary, or that Parliament by closing its doors would be allowing labour to struggle unaided through the toughest ordeal of the last eighteen years. Xevertheless the financial stringency had gripped the country too long and filled the workers and the department which looks after their interests with too anxious forebodings to escape serious notice jn the department's report. "Although the majority in this Dominion have been fully employed during the year," says the opening sentence, "certain classes of labour here have felt severely pinched by the scarcity of employment, especially as winter approaches." Both the general and the local causes are, with one necessary exception, well stated in the report. The financial 'extravagance of the Govern- i ment is not a matter upon which, j an officer in its employ could properly touch, but the shortness of money j in Europe and America, which straitened our best customers and brought prices down with a run, and the habits of extravaganco and speculation whiph. our long prosperity had engendered locally, are graphically indicated as the main causes of the trouble. The creation of "boom prices" for land was one of the most unfortunate results of tho speculation that had become rife in good times. When the pinch came it "adversely affected speculative building and speculative investment to an extreme extent;" and so it is that the building trades, especially in the North Island, where a more rapid expansion had inspired a higher fever of speculation, are mentioned a« having been hit with particular severity. At the other end of the scale was agricultural labour, which the report state-s to have been "well employ - eu ' throughout the year. The temporary pressure of unskilled labour in Auckland, following on the completion of the Main Trunk Railway, is referred to as having been relieved by the provision of other public worKs ; and the interesting statement is made with regard to the volume of work found by the Government throughout the year. "A largo body of workers has," says the report, "been engaged on the roads and railways this year (much higher than in any previous year), their numbers rising during the year from about six thousand to ten thousand men." We may mention, here that an interesting and novel feature of the present report is that it is illustrated. Some of the illustrations are informing and helpful, as, for instance, those of the interiors of clothing factories in Auckland, Christchurch, and Dunedin, of the woollen mill at Petone, and of shearers' quarters in Canterbuiy and the Wairarapa. These pictures throw a direct light upon what is being done for the worker of this country as the result very largely of the Labour laws and the watchful administration of the Labour Department. But as much cannot be said of some of the other illustrations. What, for instance, can we learn from the "Group of Co-operative Workmen, Makatote Gorge, North Island Main Trunk Railway;" from the "Co-operative Workmen on Railway-con-struction Work;" or from the "Immigrants from Great Britain arriving in Wellington Harbour?" A snapshot of the crowded deck of any other steamer in still water would have told us just as much as the last of these pictures about our immigration policy, and nobody would have been any the wiser or the lo»&wtao if it had been tubatituted.

How much money the6e immigrants have in their pockets, how much the country is paying to bring them here, what are their qualifications for earning a living, and how much overcrowded already is the only class of work for which they Teally have any ta-ste or aptitude? are questions on which tho picture throws no light. So with regard to the cooperative groups. We learn nothing of the mysteries of the co-operative stroke or of what it costs the country from seeing half-a-dozen men in one case and rather more than a dozen in the other, lined up at the command of the photographer. Some of us look our best, and some our worst, on such occasions, but of what the country really wants to know with regard to the inwardness of the co-operative system such a picture tells us nothing. It might as well have I been taken on the stage of the Opera House.