RETRENCHMENT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9022, 7 April 1888, Page 3

RETRENCHMENT.

TO THE EDITOR.

Sib,—The report of yesterday's meeting of the Parnell Borough Council is instructive. The Council finds it necessary to reduce its expenditure, and at once rushes to the usual Auckland method of retrenchment—the reduction of the officers' salaries. Not a word apparently is said of any other reduction of expense—it is only the unfortunate officers and workmen who are to bo " retrenched ;" and yet it was said at th» meeting, apparently without contradiction, that the Council had a " very poorly paid staff and a very efficient one. Under euch circumstances it is, to say the least, rather hard that because your employers have been extravagant, you are to suffer—not they. If a private person has had in his employpossibly for years—a servant who is " very poorly paid and very efficient," we should think the servant very badly treated if, when his master had to cut down his expenditure, he began, and perhaps ended, his retrenchment by cutting down this trusty servant's wages. Surely one might) expect him first to try to cut down hie expenses in some other way, especially if hie own extravagance bad brought him into difficulties. But in Auckland this cutting down of salaries seems to be our only idea of retrenchment. Yet it was not the example set us by the Government; we must all admit that, while they have cut down salaries in the Civil Service, they have ata least honestly tried to be more economical in other directions. If the officials are ovei paid or are not needed, the case is different; but it seems to me a most deplorable feature of the present era of retrenchment that (even when the officers are efficient and underpaid) this cutting down of salaries, which ought to be the last, is always the first measure adopted. I shall not enter further into the general question, but hope that before the Council take definite steps in this direction they will try to effect their economy in some other way than by reducing the salaries of officers "very poorly paid and very efficient." I may add that I have nothing whatever to do with Parnell or the Parnell Council, and therefore sign my self, yours, &c., Onlooker. April 5, 1888.