UNSKILLED LABOURERS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 5 August 1926, Page 5

UNSKILLED LABOURERS.

« NO INCREASE IN WAGES

ARBITRATION COURT’S DECISION. (BY TELEGRAPH PRESS ASSOCIATION.) DUNEDIN, Aug. 5. The general rate of Is lt)d per hour for unskilled labourers is to- remain the same, according to a statement by the Arbitration Court in a, memorandum to the builders’, contractors’, and general labourers’ award. The rate was fixed in September, 1925, and, according to the court’s decision, nothing; has occurred .since to justify an increase. The workers’ representative on the courts dissents to this.

The statement sets out that there has been no increase in the cost of living since last September, and that the economic and industrial situation did not justify a further increase. The margin between the basic rate for unskilled workers and the rate for semiskilled and skilled was insufficient to enable the court to increase one without increasing the others by a similar amount.

George Faulkner, while working on road construction at R-ahotu yesterday afternoon, was caught by a fall of earth, and sustained a. fractured shoulder. He was picked up by a motor car and brought to the Hawera. Hospital, where lie is progressing favourably. The need for a wireless station either at Napier or Gisborne was stressed by a prominent official of Messrs Richardson and Co. recently, in discussing the proposed equipping of the larger vessels of the firm’s coastal lleet with wireless He stated that the one difficulty wit'll which they had to contend was a barrier which exists along the coast from Cape Runaway to Gisborne, causing steamer,s equipped with wireless to lo.se touch with Auckland and Wellington when in this locality, was tiie formation of the coastline, says an exchange, and the country bordering on it which caused this barrier, and what was really required was a local station. The iM-ako, which has just come off the slip at. Auckland, is the first of the company’s vessels to he equipped with wireless, and it is expected that the Pakura, Putiki, Parer a. and Awaken will be provided: with the apparatus within the next six months.