RELIEF WORK PAY

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 32, 9 February 1929, Page 8

RELIEF WORK PAY

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —We read in to-night's "Evening Post" a statement by Mr. J. Preston, of Waikouaiti, that men are leaving regular jobs to go on relief works. We would like to ask Mr. Preston for a list of the number of men doing so, and to ask him what sort of jobs the men leave. If the jobs are like the job given to two men, £2 per week and keep for scrubcutting—all we have to say is we do not blame them. Scrub-cutting- is worth more than £3 10s per week, and at that we are allowing 30s per week for board— £2 per week, plus keep 30s.

Now, here is a real case of a man who has worked on relief works nearly the whole of last year, and what there has been of this year, on fine days. No work is '.done on • very wet days, consequently no pay for wet days. When, one looks back and thinks of the many teeming wet days during last year, especially during the winter, and when one considers the days lost between the finish up of one relief job, and the start on another, one can get some idea of the wage a man gets on the average. From our own experience, we find it works out at about 8s 9d per day, and on that we have had to keep a home, and try and keep the "tiger" from gnawing out our innards. We know the feel of that "tiger." We know the misery of wearing old footwear, the same old togs summer and winter, no hope of new ones on the relief work's pay. If the pay was 16s per day, when one allows for the wet weather, one would only be getting about enough to appease one's hunger and clothes sufficient to be decent and tidy. We hope tfhe' Prime Minister will turn a deaf.,, ear Ho such selfish representations as were suggested by the Farmers' Union executive. The farmers do not seem to understand that if men get the living wage they spend it locally. They do not receive enough to hoard it up, and spend it in foreign countries. What would become of the farmers if all, working-class people went back to nature and wore only a fig leaf and ate only fruit? Who would need his wood or his beef and mutton?—l am, etc., , ■ - : :; A-BELIEF WORKER'S WIFE. ,