The Menace to Farmers

Feilding Star, Volume I, Issue 283, 5 June 1907, Page 2

The Menace to Farmers

We have already pointed out the gravity of the position farmers will be in if the demands of the Farm Laborers' Union of Canterbury are extended to this district, but we are aware that those who will be effected have not the remotest idea of the ordeal they will have to undergo when they are placed in the unfortunate position town employers now occupy. The terms of employment are now fenced in with such extraordinary conditions impossible of fulfilment in the country districts, at any rate, that it is with fear and trembling that a man is given work. We know ono employer, for instance, who is affected by six awards, and it is quite a study in legal routine for him to arrive at a conclusion as to which set of conditions a particular employee comes under. He has never yet missed being cited to appear at every sitting of the Conciliation Board and Arbitration Court, and he has heard with delighted (?) amazement that the Minister of Labor has decided to set up another Board — a Wages Board— at which he will be able to spend the time he has to spare between the other two bodies. Life will thus have more zest and exhiliaration than it possesses at present, and his business will have to run itself without his personal supervision.- In our own little tin-pot way the Star office is not doing so bad, as we are subject to three separate awards, and as we have lately added a hand-cart to our equipment, we are taking legal opinion as to whether the lad who furnishes the motive-power is to be classed as a driver and to be compelled to join the Drivers' Union, or whether he is merely to be treated as an ordinary, garden-variety sort of everyday-boy. We notice that the editor of the Farmers' Union Advocate has been interviewed in Conterbury in regard to the demands of the Farm Laborers' Union, and he said that it was the beginning of the end; that it would mean that the dairy industry would be crippled in the North Island, or, rather, that the supplanting of hand labor by machinery would ruin many people, and create an acute unemployed problem.