OVERLOADING INDUSTRIES. A Southern Instance.

Free Lance, Volume VII, Issue 361, 1 June 1907, Page 6

OVERLOADING INDUSTRIES. A Southern Instance.

THE Arbitration Court seems to be piling the buidien on the backs of the employers if its attatuae in the Felt Hatters' Union award at Dunedin. is any cntaiion. The effect of the awaud, which says that a felt hattea- shall be paid a week's work wihethei he works a week ar only a part of ome 43 that he will be doing equally good work -whether be. makes six hate or twelve. The pririioi'pQ© of paying people foi work they don't do may be philanthropic, buit i<t isn't business. Furthermore, the average man wouldn't expect to get wages for staying at home any more than an average man would expect to pay foi a pound of butter that his grocer didn't send him. In struggling industries — and the hat-making business in New Zealand is emphatically a struggling industry — the operatives, of course, know how struggling it is when they accept a job to make hats, and if fuM time cannot be worked, there are plenty of other jobs about wheire full time can always be worked. * ♦ • Hat-making employeirs are, of course, bound to pay overtime when there is a spasm of orders, and they must mow, a/pparently, pay wages nben tbeire aire no ordters. All imported wearing apparel is heavily taxied in New Zealand, and! this is supposed to be not only to protect the mamjufactuirer and spur him to greater efforts, but to make work for industrial operatives. If the said local industries are "protected" by making them pay for things that aren't marmfactuired, there will soon be no things manufactured at all. Therefore, the men who aie now to be paid for woik unpei formed won't have any work to do in their own line, and will, perforce, have to find other avenues. • • • If it is reasonable foir a hatter to be paid for the hate he might have made, but didn't, it is rught that a navvy should 1 be paid for the mullock he didn't sibift, through being unable to work in the wet. And if it is night for the navvy to be paid when he doesn't work, it is raght for the baker to dharge for the bread his oastomiers might have bought if they had been hungrier. If it is right for the baker to charge for the bread that hasn't left the slhop, it is just for the citizen to' observe the laws that haven't been made, and for peopde who are teetotallers to give over drdnking beer, and fct, vegetarians to abstain from meat.