EFFICIENCY IMPAIRED BY RETRENCHMENT

Manawatu Times, Volume LV, Issue 6833, 14 April 1932, Page 7

EFFICIENCY IMPAIRED BY RETRENCHMENT

Allegation of State Employees’ Meeting ADOPTION OF CONFERENCE PROPOSALS URGED ON GOVERNMENT Per Press Association. WELLINGTON, April 13. A meeting of delegates from the Wellington branches of State employees’ organisations carried a resolution strongly appealing to the Government to refrain from further instituting “the short-sighted policy of reducing the purchasing power of the workers of the Dominion, which can lead only to disaster to the State and the community as a whole, particularly the business section and farmers, owing lo the consequent extensive destruction of the local market and the huge increase in the already large army of unemployed men and women.” The resolution urges that in some departments retrenchment has been so severe as to affect efliciency; that the withholding of the annual increments of the younger members of State services constitutes a breach of contract and throws an inequitable burden on the shoulders of those least able to boar it; that the Government adopt the constructive measures already advocated by the Dominion executives of the State employees’ organisations and workers generally, instead of “out-of-date proposals that assuredly must bring ruin and disaster (o our country.”

An assurance is given that, in passing the resolution, the State employees arc not actuated by a spirit of selfishness or a desire to shirk a fair share of the common burden or lo unduly harass the Government, but byloyalty to the country and the great traditions of the pioneers who “sought to establish a State that would provide a bright and wholesome lesson to the civilised world, and which, a.s a result, became for many years, the wonder and envy of other countries —an ideal from which, it is wholeheartedly regretted, those in present authority arc seeking to depart.”