EXTRA HALF-HOUR’S WORK

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 26, 30 December 1925, Page 2

EXTRA HALF-HOUR’S WORK

HOW COUNTRY WOULD BENEFIT A plea for an extra half-hour’s work is thus put by the London Observer: “Thero is not a twentieth paid; of the human race that has not good cause to envy us—whether tho comparison bo social or economic, actual or perspective. Wo have enormous resources in the strategic position of our minerals, in the climatic facilities and equipment of our textiles, in tho soil that wo have spurned, in the capital and experience ’we have inherited. These things will not give us stability or maintain our standards of life by themselves. But they will do that and more, if united with the determination that alone can deserve them. What they require is to have turned on to them aji equal and simultaneous intensity of brain and muscle. We do not believe that the standard of living is incapablo of being raised, provided that the standard of exertion, mental and physical, is also raised. Wo see anything but salvation- in an employers’ movement for the cutting of wages. But to ask for a higher wage on the present basis of costs and output is to ask for what is in no man’s power to give. Present standards will not bo maintained without the active concurrence of Labour. A general increase of as little as half an hour in the working day, limited to an agreed period of duration, would bo enough to work some remarkable changes in the industrial outlook! Some special effort of tliat nature is needed to give tho industrial macliine the. little extra momentum that it needs to develop full power. It would not go unrewarded. Tho return to tho country and to Labour itself would bo well beyond the physical contribution. The predictions of optimists and pessimists mean no more to the future of the nation than so many incantations. It is the concerted push that is wanted now to lift it clear of all danger.”