MILK OH! An Eight Hour Day for Milkers.

Free Lance, Volume VI, Issue 290, 20 January 1906, Page 6

MILK OH! An Eight Hour Day for Milkers.

AN Auckland Labour paper arises, with the veins standing out on its forehead, and calls upon the Government to effect a great reform. It asserts, from its office chair, that from 4.30 in. the morning until 8, and from 4.30 in the afternoon until the pall of night has settled o'er the cow byre, the cows are being milked. It is wrong. The paper knows it ia wrong. It is asking Mr. Seddon now, at once, to stop this sweating. Fancy having to get up at 4, and. milk cows! Why not get up at 7.30, start milking at 8, work eight hours, and have a good time doing nothing after? * * * If there are twenty or thirty cows waiting to be milked at 5, never mind 'em. Just turn them out. They will get used to it, and you won't have to milk them in a few days at all, because they will be dry. On the other hand, you might turn the calves out with them, and keep them wet. There are lots of ways of releasing the poor, tired, illused person who is forced to bring relief to cows twice a-day, seven days a week, four weeks a month, and twelve months a year, with no holidays. The funny thing about agitations for the stopping of cow-sweating, is they don't come from the suffering country milkers. They come from the city milkers, who probably don't know an udder from a fountain pen. Still, the idea of an eight-hours' day, and no more or no less, is a very splendid one, and we hereby step into the breach vacated by the Auckland paper to say a hideous injustice is being done to sailor men. Ships should start from port at 8 in the morning, and fires should be drawn at 4.15, so that everybody can be free at 5. If cow-milking is to be stopped after 5, so must shipsailing, and train-steaming, and very many other sweating businesses. The Auckland editor that has enlightened the world on the subject of an eight-hour dairy-farming day is deserving of very high appreciation, and a big per centage of butter-fat m his milk. He should drop paper for cows, and ink for milk. We want a demonstrator for a nonsweating school of cow-milking, and a breed of cows that will refuse to give milk on the statutory holidays and Sundays. If these reforms cannot be effected, the worker and the milker must not be allowed to suffer. • * * We would rather go without butter and milk than permit any poor soul to milk a necessitous cow at the unearthly hour of 4 in the morning. The eight hours a-day workman, who starts his toil at 8, and knocks off at 5, wouldn't mind a bit if the milk didn't turn up in the morning. He would recognise that the milker had as much right to short hours as he himself has. You know, as well as we do, the absolute fairness of the unionist, and that his heart is always filled with the milk of human kindness for his back-blocks brother. It is, therefore, clearly unnecessary that his jug should be filled with mere cow-milk any longer.