HARVEST WORK AND WAGES.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXXI, Issue 15257, 18 March 1910, Page 8

HARVEST WORK AND WAGES.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir,—Last week there appeared a paragraph in your news columns reporting the usual scarcity of labour on Government railway work. A oil stated that these men had left their employment to seek harvesting. ’There can be only one explanation of this. The men could not have been paid a living wage, otherwise they were very unwise to leave their work on the off chance of obtaining harvest work, as it- is vastly more difficult to get it this year than ever before. To prove that my statement is not exaggerated, I enclose a paragraph from the local paper here, “The Guardian,” dated January 13. I need only add that there is a large number of unemployed men waiting for the job that does not materialise. The grain is being threshed from the stook, which limits the Clumber of men employed, and in many cases it is not even stocked, but tlweshed from the cut rows on the ground. Taking these hard facts into consideration, the meanest intelligence will realise what substratum of truth is contained in the fabrications of our optimistic Prime Minister and the rest of the bogus Liberal politicians who, never having done a day’s manual labour in their lives, are totally incapable of appreciating the vicarious suffering of the workless man, and spend their time in capitalising rainbow myths about the “prosperity” and the “buoyancy of the revenue” of God’s own land.—l am, etc., VERITAS. Ashburton, January 25.