LABOUR STILL LACKING

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23997, 21 June 1941, Page 10

LABOUR STILL LACKING

A confession of abject failure on the part of the Government in the organisation of manpower is implicit in the plight of East Coast farmers who are in danger of losing their entire maize crop owing to the shortage of hands to harvest it. Maize-growing is an industry in which the Dominion can and should be Belf-suflicient. To this end tho Government itself appealed to farmers in the Bay of Plenty and Gisborne districts to increase the acreage of maize in order to provide a crop which would meet in full the Dominion's requirements for the ensuing 12 months. Now the entire effort pleaded for by the Government is threatened by the chronic inability of that self-same Government to make labour available for essential tasks. It can spend nearly £300,000 a year in the provision of unemployment benefits, it can employ men by the thousands on unproductive railways and palatial public buildings, but it lacks the elementary intelligence to draft a small labour force for the harvesting of a crop grown in response to its own specific requests. Local members of the Home Guard, who have volunteered their services for defence, have been working in the Whakatane district to save maize from going to waste. Perhaps this is the Government's solution to the whole labour problem—let the willing horse do all the work on which the wealth of the country depends, but let nothing be done to interfere with the sacred right of those who subsist on the bounty of the State. "Poverty in the midst of plenty" used to be one of the slogans of Labour in the days of the depression; "wealth without work" seems to be its ruling slogan to-day.