BRITAIN’S WORKLESS

Manawatu Standard, Volume L, Issue 74, 22 February 1930, Page 9

BRITAIN’S WORKLESS

POVERTY IN LANCASHIRE. INDUSTRY’S DARKEST HOUR. CONDITIONS BECOMING WORSE. (United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copvright.) LONDON, Feb. 20. Not since the war has the grim spectre of unemployment been so prevalent in England. Lancashire is now facing its darkest hour in industrial history. Week by week unemployment is growing apace. Roughly a quarter of a million Lancashire cotton operatives are out of work. The weaving section is in a worse state of poverty than ever before. Hundreds of homes are within a hair’s breadth of ruin, and people are living from hand to mouth, though naturally amid the despondency and gloom there is a lingering hope that thereorganisation of the whole trade will restore better times. Women arc the heaviest sufferers. They find themselves discarded by the trade in which they worked with real pride. A weaver’s average weekly wage for months past has been less than thirty shillings. In order to make a deoent living wives have gone to work alongside of their husbands, but to-day they have been robbed of that opportunity. Ileal poverty is prevailing among thousands of middle-aged spinsters who have worked in the mills all their lives. An extent of the unemployment is gained from the fact that in Nelson, a typical weaving town of fifteen thousand operatives, this week there are four thousand out of work, ar.d this number is growing weekly. In addition to this, few mills are working anything like full time. FORTY THOUSAND IN SYDNEY. SYDNEY, Feb. 21. The secretary of the Labour Council, Mr J. S. Garden, declares that there are at least forty thousand unemployed woikors in Syduey.