Greymouth Evening Star. AND BRUNNERTON ADVOCATE. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1934. JOY OF WORK.

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 December 1934, Page 6

Greymouth Evening Star. AND BRUNNERTON ADVOCATE. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1934. JOY OF WORK.

JN this holiday period, there will be many agreeing that the nobility of work, like the sweet uses of adversity, is over-rated, and that too much of a good thing may be had. Each generation has a tendency to reduce the hours of labour, industrial conditions today, contrasting strongly with those of 50 to 100 years ago. Today’s workers criticise their forefathers for accepting long hours with small pay and few holidays. Will those of the next century similarly wonder whj’ to-day’s .industrial conditions were so much worse than their own ? Science machinery, and. other factors are increasingly contriving to reduce the necessity for human, labour, and it is a reasonable expectation that work will take a less dominant part in the lives of mankind with each generation. The birthrate may decrease at such a rate that there will not be any surplus labour giving rise to unemployment problems. That remedy would be worse than the disease.

Italy, or rather, Signor Mussolini. has initiated an interesting experiment where labour is concerned. Councils of corporations control every form of work and output in the country, capital and labour being on terms of equality. This is easy to contrive when both are State-controlled. Signor Mussolini is enamoured of his own scheme declaring it to be the most ' imposing event in Italian history. Ho said: “The Fascist regime holds that all men arc Workers and are not distinguished by any difference in social grades. Work is both a social obligation and a right. Its creative joy ought to widen and ennoble life and not narrow and depress it.” Too true, but what work ought to do, and its actual effect, are too often not in accordance With the Mussolini w'ordpicture. The Duce emphasised that it was too early to talk of a redistribution of wealth.

Meanwhile, the Italian State is seizing moi’e private, property and curtailing private liberty. This will seem to other nations a high price to pay for work’s “creative joy.” A cablegram from Rome this week claimed success for the 44 hours week, in relieving unemployment, but the Fascist control enables “success” to be made of any scheme authorised by Mussolini. The new coi'porations, which will displace Parliament, control all departments of industrial and other work. Their scope covers landowners and tenant farmers, employers and employed connected with all forms of industry, commercial travellers, trade and agricultural production, mining, banking, and insurance, sea, land and air transport, and liberal professions. Even hawkers of newspapers, ice-cream, old clothes, rags and bottles, street musicians, and doorkeepers are included. Mussolini whilst warning that “no immediate miracles” must be expected, promises that his scheme will abolish poverty, and that its success will induce all nations to copy it. It is to be hoped that he is right, but there is scope for scepticism. Italy’s own financial position is not such as to cause envy among other lands, and this despite more than a. decade of Fascism. The right to work carries with it the right to adequate compensation, otherwise slavery would be a desirable aim.