SUNDAY SHEARING

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXX, 17 December 1936, Page 12

SUNDAY SHEARING

REPLY TO COMPLAINTS A reply to the complaints about Sunday shearing was made by Mr A. P. O’Shea, the secretary of the New Zealand Farmers’ Union. Mr O’Shea said that anyone with sheep station experience would realise that regular Sunday work was impracticable. In the first place, the sheep dogs were not able to stand up to the continuous work without a break that would be involved in Sunday shearing. Even six day’s work a week was a big strain on the dogs, and without a spell they would become exhausted. Lame dogs could wreck a shearing.

Shearers usually had a season’s programme of work. They had a number of stations marked down on which they did shearing, and if they could not finish their work through wet weather, men who had been shearing in dry districts came in and obtained work at the expense of those who had been delayed. “You will never find shearing done on a Sunday at the request of the station owners,” said Mr O’Shea, “because they usually have enough trouble on a place of any size to keep the sheep up to a fast gang of shearers. Nowadays a shearer thinks nothing of doing 200 sheep a day. In the past, Sunday shearing has been winked at by the authorities because the men themselves desired it. One cannot run a farm like a factory and work to schedule hours and schedule. days, and from the point of view of national prosperity, it is not advisable to do so.” Mr O’Shea said that the weather and the bidi-bidi had an important influence on shearing, from the point of view both of the shearer and the station owner. If the bidi-bidi were allowed to mature and get into the wool, it depreciated the value of the staple, and that reacted directly on the shearer’s pay, which was on a sliding scale based on the previous year’s wool values. The higher the price for wool the better the rate of pay for shearing. In many cases, -i-earing was done by contract, and the men were anxious to get through their work as quickly as possible. Shearing work was really piecework, and the men themselves realised that the more they did the more they earned.