LOW WAGES IN THE EAST

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 2 April 1930, Page 8

LOW WAGES IN THE EAST

WORKERS' MEAGRE COMFORT EFFECT OF WESTERN STANDARDS EMPLOYMENT OF CHILD LABOUR After describing the low wages and poor standard of comfort ruling in the Far East, Mr J. A. Brailsford, 8.A., lecturing before the W.E.A. at the Whitclcy Hall, New Plymouth, pointed out that the competition of the 1 Eastern peoples with our own was not prevented by exclusion laws.' Ho instanced the present disastrous slump in the British cotton manufacturing industry, one of the chief causes of which was that the Lancashire- producers were undersold by those of India, China and Japan. "You know, too," said the lecturer,, "that whatever injures our people in the Homeland injures us here; when times are bad there they cannot give us the best prices for our wool and butter." It was impossible to disregard the squalor of the life of the masses in Asiatic cities, said Mr Brailsford. He told how women, sometimes with children on their backs, helped in the bard toil of coaling steamers at Nagasaki by hand. Beggars on the streets of China would sometimes strike their heads against the paving stones in an effort to arouse sympathy.

THE LURE OE INDUSTRY . The advent of the factory industries had brought country 'people to the towns, as in the industrial era in Western lantls. The lure of somewhat higher wages tempted the peasants who did not know how much more costly it was to live decently in a city than on a farm. In China, factory owners were hardly at all checked by regulations or inspection and the labour unions were comparatively weak. After a great struggle some slight restriction had been placed on the exploitation of child labour. From the report of the Child Labour Commission which made an investigation in Shanghai hi 1923 the speaker quoted passages such as the following:— "The commission has seen very many children at work who could not have been more than six years of age. The hours of work are generally twelve, with not more than one hour for a meal. The children frequently have to stand the whole time they are at work. In many industries day and night work is the rule, there being two shifts of twelve hours each. In some instances, contractors obtain young children from the country districts, paying the parents 4s a month for the services of each child. The contractor is able to make a profit of about 8s a month in respect of each child. These children are frequently most miserably housed and fed. They receive no money and their conditions of life are practically those of slavery." :

CHILD LABOUR In spite of such revelations, the proposal to abolish child labour—or even to limit it to children over ten years of age —was met with protests of "righteous indignation" on the part of people who claimed that the children would be even worse off if they were excluded from the factories, since their parents could not support them. This was the argument that had been used in similar circumstances in Britain and whose falsity had been proved by the event. After a great contest some improvement had been brought about in Shanghai, and in Japan a law forbidding child labour and prohibiting the employment of women on night shifts in the mills had been passed. It was not enforced for some years, but the speaker understood that it had token actual effect from last July. Apart from the modern factory system and the creation of big businesses, the harshness of life in the East had been largely mitigated, said Mr. Brailsford, by the loyalty of the clan members to one another and by the humane guild system. Some of the modern employers were carrying over this spirit into their enterprises, arranging welfare work and co-partnership schemes probably as excellent as the best in Britain or any Western land, but others Profit sharing was common in 'China and Japan. The humanity of the old system was seen in the unwillingness of employers to dismiss workers e\en when a business was losing money.

INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY It was a very interesting question, said the lecturer, whether the class struggle would develop in the Hast as in the West or whether out of the eld spirit of the clan and guild w.iuld grow a system of free He quoted Dr Henry Hodgkin, author of "China in the Family of Nations," as venturing to hope that China would avoid the class struggle and attain industrial democracy in a natural way. If we in the West could learn the way of friendly co-operation, the lecturer thought, it would not only help us to compete with the East but would make easier the intercourse between East and West which was bound to increase with the improvement of means of communication.

While postponing discussion of the exclusion policy to a later lecture. Sir Brailsford said the growing economic interdependence of the nations .should be studied; the people of the East were coming rapidly towards our standards of wages and prices; we also were affected by the contacts with the East. While systems of co-operation were needed to replace the old bonds of family and clan, what was more necessary than any system was that mankind should learn to recognise the value of human personality, of whatever race or colour. •

IS THE WORLD OVER-POPULATED?

At the conclusion of the lecture Mr Wright put forward the view that birth control offered a cure for the poverty of the East and that pressure of population was the cause o£ unemployment and wars as well as of distressful poverty. He quoted statistics to show that France had less unemployment than any other country except during a financial crisis in 1927. lie read from speeches by General Bernhardi and Mussolini advocating a warlike policy on the ground of the prolificacy of their respective peoples. Was not this proof that wars were due to over-population? Replying, Mr Brailsford pointed out that the war impulse came not from the people who felt any pressure of population but from ambitious leaders. The disputes leading up to the Great War had been more over fields for profitable investment tkan over outlets for population, and certainly the appeals to the manhood of the nations had contained no suggestion of killing off surplus millions of humanity, but had called to

tho most noble impulses of chivalry and ideals for a better world. HUMANITY'S POSSIBILITIES As to unemployment, the statistics showed prolific Germany to be with France in the most advantageous position, indicating that the difficulties of Britain and other countries were probably duo to their financial policy of "deflation," not to lack of birth control. Tho speaker quoted tho British authority Carr-Saunders to show that all economists agreed that the present

unemployment was not due to overpopulation but to maladjustment after the war. Mr Brailsford contended that, while artificial limitation of births might be the lesser of two evils in individual cases, humanity had enormous possibilities in social betterment, in the elimination of waste —such huge waste as that of unemployment and wars—and in scientific progress. He added that the authorities were not agreed on the question whether the birth-rate automatically declined as the conditions of life improved.