ITALIAN WORKMEN.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 7718, 15 April 1887, Page 4

ITALIAN WORKMEN.

A valuable report is made liy Mr J. G. Kennedy, Secretary of the Embassy at Rome,' and published among the Foreign Office papers, from which we gather that the Wages, and consequently the diet, ]ocl"ing, and comforts of Italian workmen are far inferior to those enjoyed by the English operatives. Among workmen ot ; the skilled- order such, as shipwrights, I boileritiakers, coppeismiths, and iron and \ Tjrass founders, the wages vary from Is lOd to 3s 6d per day, whilst foremen in the sametrades receive from 4s to Ss per day, j according to circumstances. Neverthe- ' less, even in Italy it seems, from a comparison of wages in the years 1874 and 1883, furnished by a Government return, there -had been a considerable advance of wages, amounting to some cases to nearly 100 per cent.; and as there has been a considerable decrease in the ■ price of provisions, , the average scale of. comfort for the Italian artisan has considerably risen. Their diet is very frugal; consisting of bread, cheese, pulse food, 'dried and salted pilchards, and herrings, with a decent weat meal on Sunday. L The:' are temperate, . Accent, industrious men, and dress teleraM,/ well on Sunday. , This low scale of living is riot surprising when we learn that their ■wages in the textile trades is even now from 2s to -3s a day for men, and considerably less for women. The wages of agricultural laborers are , not given in figures, 'bnt they are said to be excessively low, and tlie diet is so poor and the rfiiality of their food so inferior that It Rives rise to many painful diseases. Many of these agricultural laborers, however, are emigrating to South America, where they are easily able to accommodate themselves' to the climate. In Italy the hours of labor are excessively long, amounting in a vast majority of trades to twelve hours. ■ One of the consequences of this low rate of pay is described by Mr . Kennedy, in giving an account of a visit to Messrs Orlando's shipbuilding yard at Leghorn! He \vas informed that those gentlemen could not produce merchant ships so cheaply as those bnilt iv English yards, but that they could build warships more' cheaply than" English shipbuilders. The complicated internal fittings of warshipsl are; said to require an unusually large amount of hand labor, which, of course, is much cheaper in- Italy than England. In some extreme cases warships'and gunboats can be produced at Leghorn as much as 30 per cent, below the price given for English work of the same