LINES ABOUT LABOR.

Evening Star, Issue 12884, 6 August 1906, Page 3

LINES ABOUT LABOR.

Congratulations to the Hon. .1. A. Millar. His inclusion in the Cabinet will give general satisfaction in Labor circles. Municipal enterprise is spreading in England. This is not matter for surprise when we read that the sum of £4,000 (equivalent to a shilling rate) has been applied in relief of rates from profits of the gas, waterworks, electrical, and marketdepartments of Bolton Corporation. Adult suffrage is now the electoral basis in Finland, but, unlike this colony, it has been expressly declared that women are eligible for seats in the Legislature. In America tho struggle between the private right to exploit and the public right to live would seem to have begun in "real earnest. The' New York State Legislature having passed a law limiting the price of gas to 80 cents per I,oooft, the local gas company are appealing against the law as unconstitutional, and the battle is to be fought in the Supreme Court of the United States. The Municipal Ownership League intend taking an active part m the struggle The managers of the cotton mills in twenty-five towns in Massachusetts and .Miode Island recently announced that the wages of their workers would be raised from July 9 Thousands of operatives are attected by this announcement, which follows the decision of the textile manufaciSJTiJ 0 revert to the iaw—l4 per cent, in advance of the present scale. V . A A Se n<ms dispute in the building trade m Austria, after lasting, several weeks, terminated on the 30th June. Th© dispute arose over wages, and the Builders' Association kcked out fifty thousand men in the bricklaying and allied trades. Substantial concessions were obtained by the men. They have secured an increase in 7 & 3t S e< * Ual to 15 *** cenfc - at once, and further increase is promised from May next year of 15 per cent. The lock-out has been ended on these term's. The death-roll in connection with the tunnel borings under the East River in connection with the underground railway project is (says the New York correspondent of the 'Standard') mounting with alarming rapidity, being increased on June 20 by two drowning accidents. A foreman and his gang were working at a tunnel heading about 300 ft from the shore, and in a rock stratum about 110 ft below the surface of the river. The men had plugged a crevice made on the previous Saturday by a small "blow-out," but the new air blast had evidently enlarged the fissure through the rock to "the quicksand. Two men were drowned outside the shield by the inrush of water, and the rest barely managed to escape through the second small emergency door. The foreman crawled through as the water rose a foot per second. The engineers confess '■hemselves nonplussed by tho repeated ''h-]«w-outs" and "bends" owing to the high 3ir-pressure, these latter alone causing numerous accidents amongst the workers. Thtf actual number of deaths since the of the four tunnels has not yet been at tied. The chief doctor to the contractors, Messrs Pearson and Co., told the corontir that some men, when placed in the medicid air-lock in the works, failed to come touni, whilst recovery was practicallv hopeless at the hospitals unprovided with a special sir chamber.

The Canterbury Trades and Labor Council have decided to urge the Government to nationalise the oilfields of the colony. ' tl Alderman Saxon, a Labor representative for King Ward, Broken Hill, New South Wales, and plaintiff in the Saxon-Norton case, has resigned his office as Alderman. The resignation was accepted by the Political League last month. The' secretary to the League was instructed to write to the parliamentary representatives for the district setting " forth the facts of the case, and requesting them to bring the matter under the notice of the Crown law_ authorities. The League passed a motion that the Labor party could not afford to have any one in a representative capacity about whom there was the slightest suspicion ,of dishonorable action. A plea for shorter hours of labor for hotel workers was made at the last meeting of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council. Cooks and their assistants como under the operation of the Factories Act, with hours limited to sixty per week, but Mr Strahan stated that other employees had, in many cases to work from seventy to a hundred-, hours a week; He coninlamed that Sir Samuel Gillott had es-

| roneously ruled that kitchen workers who .[ did,not could not be called 'cooks' assistants, "and" consequently they ! were deprived of the benefits of *the.Facj tones Act. Mr ; Strahan: urged the Coun--cil to take advantage of. the drat ting of the new-Lioensiiig Bill to ask the; Premier to, at a restriction y£ the° hbuis at "which other hotel I employees;'may be compelled to work. • He suggested that a, deputation ask the. Premier to extend the sixty hours' maximum to all tie employees. A long;and ! at times -acrimonious discussion ensiled,' ' in which the more extreme members;- of : ; the Council -urged- that forty-eight hours 1 should be the maximum asked for. vtJltimately the Council' decided to fix ; quest at eight hours a day. - j.. Broken liill mine-owners are having'a slack time. Seven" hundred members of ; the Australian Miners' Association are r re- ' gistered on the books'as workers, and tHe total number of unemployed in the city . is estimated at fourteen hundred. j The United Labor partv in South Aua- ; traha have selected the following candi- , dates to contest the Federal elections for , the House of Representatives :—Messrs Batehelor, Hutchison, Poynton, Vaughan, Bey, and Campbell. For the Senate: Messrs Russell, Blundell, and Campbell. The rehearing of the case brought by Thomas Trewartha against the Confidence Extended Company, Victoria, for the recovery of £I,OOO compensation : for injuries said to have been- sustained by an accident while working in the company's mine at California Gully, has been concluded at Bendigo, the . jury awarding plaintiff £350 damages. , When the case was previously heard a verdict was given m favor of the company.'but,'on appeal, a rehearing was granted--on the ground that some of the witnesses had during the proceedings spoken to members of the

jury. The. following are taken irem the 'Rules and Regulations' of a large London. West End drapery store. The fines "go to support the library," but the-x 'iur-roiichin-c character is calculated to destroy Hhc' most ardent literary taste. There are 198 rules, and they relate tu every .department of tiio. jiff, and .deportment of a 15hop assistant. There are 6d rules' ami 3d .rules and 2d rules— that* is, the punishment is made to fit the crime by a sliding scale. The rules as to "living hi" suggest the stringency of a prison, only fifteen minutes being allowed for breakfast. Under the 6d rules comes the following.; -"Customers must not be allowed to leave the shop unobserved before the buyer or shopwalker has been. spoKm to. Imagine a busy day and a sixpennv linotrembling in the balance while a. perspiring assistant is .groping -~for the shopwalker with one hand and detaining an obdurate customer with the other.' Here is another 6d one: '' No lengthy however short, to be given in to a customer." It also costs 6d to call a, woman "Miss." The correct thing is "Madam." In some establishments there are rules providing for the searching of the assistants at any moment. Bart Kennedy, the novelis-t. reoetitly quoted from just such another book the following -. —"Any assistant knowing or suspecting any unfaithfulnetss. fraud, error, or irregularity, or concealed practice injurious to the firm, or any breach of its rules, is bound to give immediate information thereof to the manager or his assistant, and to exert himself or herself to prevent or detect the offence, and failing to report such irregularity will be hold to have acted in complicity with the person-or persons ofi'endThe following advertisement (says the 'Daily News') appeared in a London paper:—

Wanted, for English married ladv (delicate), living in large. Oastle in hills in l>eautiful part of Austria (no children), strong, active, industrious German useful help (or English, speaking fluent German), not under thirty yeans of age : must be well educated and refined, willing to do housework, good cook when required; experienced in all household duties and thoroughly understanding economical management, order, cleanliness, and wellkept rooms; good dressmaker essential, and fine needlewoman; care of house linen, willing and capable to act as personal maid-attendant to lady; daily care of clothes and wardrobe; only a strong, amiable; and generally useful unspoilt person would suit, having already held position in family as useful help with such duties; necessary to be someone fond of very quiet, simple country life and really attached to animals and flowers. Requested to apply in German, stating, to save correspondence, very full particulars as to capabilities, experience, references, photograph, salary asked, and any possible recommendations, to ~, —. Mr A. Moore,, of Leicester, supports the contention of Mr Silas Hocking, the novel- , ist, that the hands of the Church are not free from the sweating evil, and continues : "I do not wish to say one word against the Church, either Conformist or Nonconformist, but having the ownership of a typewriting office, I am sorry to have to state that the worst-paid work that is offered to me is Church work. I now always refuse work from one denomination, which I will not name, as whatever price is quoted I am told that the amount cannot be afforded, notwithstanding the fact that the church is a wealthy one. It is a great pity that this sweating is resorted. to; I cannot believe that it is necessary. If the money is not forthcoming the work should not be done. It is a bad thing for the churches to set this- evil example." Mr Rider Haggard, who was a witness before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Housing of the Working Classes Acts Amendment Bill, in the course of his evidence said that inquiries which he had made showed him that housing was generally defective in rural districts. The worst place he know in this was- a village in Somersetshire. There was not a house fit for a human being; all the walls seemed to bo falling down, and the doors and windows were all loose. The most extraordinary case of rural housing, or rather the lack of it, was one in Essex, near Waltham. There he found twenty men working on a farm, but he could see no cottages'. The men lived in one of the farm buildings, a brick shed, about 14ft square, and looking like a wag-gon-house. It had no windows. Sacks were laid on the floor round the wall, and there the twenty men slept. Some of them had been there three years. A hundred yards away I saw an elm tree on a hill There I found the ashes of a fire and a rod to hold a pot. This was the dwelling-place the krtchen, and tie parlor of the twentv men. Winter and summer they did their cooking and spent their Sundays under th( tree. In Huntingdonshire the houses wer< perfectly awful. The instances he had crtec were the worst which he found on a tou through twenty-six counties. In Norfoll there were more houses than were wanted because of the desertion of the land by tin laborer. Housing was worst when the cotta£» w « re bought by speculative people. the Germans have approached the pri blem of worklessness in a logical and orderJ spirit. They have tried (says Mr Dawsor in his recently-published book ' The Gei man Workman') to deal with itstepbystei stage by stage, by measures which enlarg. and supplement each other, and, taken tc gether, cover the whole ground. They be gin first with a system of labor register? the largest and most efficient known tan industrial State." A manufacturing town without a well-managed labor registry m regular operation is rare in Germany. Some of the municipalities provide waiting and refreshment rooms, where the vacancy list is read out at regular intervals. Mr Dawson mentions as one of the most noteworthy features the growing tendency to amalgamate the trade union registries with the public registries. In Berlin and Munich all the separate trade union registries are affiliated with the municipal scheme. The Karlsruhe Bureau has even succeeded in bringing together the Protestant and Roman Catholic Workers' Associations, as well as the trade unions, in the common interests of labor mediation. Prussia alone had in ISO. 7 > no fewer than 276 labor registries, either communal in management or aided by communal subsidies. There were 545,642 applications for work and 582,711 applications for workers. The pjfblic labor registries of the whole Empire are estimated to have found work for about 600,000 persons during th? year ended March, 1904. / v