UNEMPLOYMENT

New Zealand Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 11304, 1 September 1922, Page 6

UNEMPLOYMENT

REPRESENTATIVE DEPUTATION TO MINISTERS POSITION IN WELLINGTON SERIOUS The unusual sight of from 200 to 300 unemployed, assembled in front of the main-entrance steps to Parliament buildings, was to bs sesn yesterday morning. The occasion was that of a deputation of Wellington unemployed, headed by Mr P. Fraser, M.P., to the Prime Minister, the Minister for Public , Works (the Hon. j. C. Coates), and the Minister for industries and Commerce (th 9 Hon. E. P. Lee). The deputation was limited to a committee of about ten men, the principal spokesmen of whom were Mr L. Clover (Waterside Workers’ Union), Mr D. R. Kennedy (Furniture Workers’ Union), and Mr Pinder.

1 Mr Fraser stated that the deputation had no industrial or political sig--1 nificance at all, and had not been started by any industrial or political organisation. As a city councillor, be found that many men were out -,f work, and he put an advertisement in the paper the previous day asking the men to meet him at the Sydney street hall yesterday morning, so that he could • get a few facts other than those which appeared in the. usual returns. “VERY, VERY SAD CASES.” He found that tliere were some very, very sad cases—one-, that of a man who had been out of employment for ten weeks. He was a carpenter with six children, and had had a very hard struggle •to get along. With the exception of one of the children earning 10s a week, he had nothing coming in at present. Fifty-one men, forty women, and from seventy to eighty children were affected by "the cases, he had inquired into; and at present in Wellington, allowing for all duplications, there were between 750 and 900 men out of work. There were 849 men registered as unemployed at the corpora.ion yards, 327 at the Labour Bureau, and about 66 at the Repatriation office. Thcce was a certain amount of duplication in, • these figures, but the obvious feature was the great increase at -the corporation yards, where the men were registering more than at the other places. For married men with families, he stated,' relief work in the country was not much good, as the men could not earn enough to keep two homes going. The deputation was not there , to. blame or condemn., the. Government,. it. was simply a deputation of unemployed men looking for work. 1 . “QUITE IN DESPAIR.” Mr Pinder said that he was absolutely sick and tired of going looking for jobs, and quite in despair/ He had been out of work for ten weeks, but was not the carpenter referred to by Mr rJYaser. ‘ He’had'got into such a desperate position, that, although hitherto unknown to the polioe, he was almost capable of committing any crime. Mr Fraser: You had hotter not do anything of the sort. That is no way out. Mr Pinder added that he was a stonemason by trade, hut he . wonld, take work as a driver or anything at all. Some members of Parliamentnad recently stated that! 'the unemployed were either unemployable' 'Or looking for work and praying that they would not find it; but he'was not unemployable and was anxious to get work. Ho resented such a stigma., as did most of the men. They were not expecting the Government to spoon-feed’ them, but just to help them, over .the present much. Some of the men had sold their , furniture, and some were beginning to ■ sell it; and that was not a very desirable state of affairs. They did not want any charity,, and .not too much sympathy; unless at was practical sympathy. He had references Hovering fifteen years’ municipal work. Mr Massey: Would you go. out of , the city? Mr Pinder: I am a married man, .Mr Massey; but I will go anywhere. POSITION ON WATERFRONT?" Mr Glover said that at the time the shipping slump started the Waterside Workers’ Union had 2300 members on the waterfront: but since then they had gradually been driven away, and at the present time there were 1500 members: on' the waterfront; Out of that number, this last week, 1000 had received employment for at minimum of two hours, and 500 men had got nothing at all. That not only applied to this week, but during the past eight or'nine weeks there had been practically 500 or 600 men who had not got a start at all: while the others might only have' had the minimum of two hours for the one job. Men had come to his office and asked for a fairer distribution of work; but the top men on the wharf were , not getting more than a living for men with families, perhaps, £4 or £5 per week. The 500 or 600 who were only getting the scraps were in a very unfortunate position. They had been advised to re gister at the corporation yards and the Labour Bureau, but the difficulty, was that they must he on the spot to get a job and thus lose the possibility of getting: a job" on the waterfront. Bt. bad unemployed men' coming to him every day, men. he had known on the waterfront ten to fifteen years. One man with. four children had earned nothing for four weeks, and prior to that his average for three months had been £2. ' “GOING DANGEROUSLY CLOSE.” As the saying whs, “the men 1 ' are not going to starve on a? stringer.” Though at present they were unknown to ' the police, this sort of thing would drive them into becoming known to the polioe. ' . 'lha Prime Minister: You are going dangerously close Mr Glover: 1 know I am going dangerously close; but The Prime Minister: It won’t do with me. . Mr Glover: I.am not meaning it that way.. But. I am putting what comes uppermost in a man’s mind when hii wife and children are going hungry. The men, he added, were not Bolsheviks, or anything of that sort; but such a position naturally drove one to desperation. He had men who had been to the relief works, getting 12s a day; and they said that they and their families could not lire on it. At one place the. foreman had told them they could start at 8s a day or get out. That was not a fair thing. He did not know whether it was a Government job or not; but he would give the Prime Minister particulars later. He was sure that the Prime Minister, who was a sympathetic man, would do what he could for the unemployed for the sake of the children. Mr Beck said that he - had been that morning to apply for a job as driver at a laundry in; Wellington road. There were fifty or sixty other applicants, and he was told that seventvfivo had turned up the previous afternoon after the place was shut; so that the owner of the laundry had the great opportunity of picking one man out of over 100. He had been in the

Dominion over eleven years, was a shop assistant, and could turn his hand to anything, except that he was not a mechanic. He wae married, with one child. DISPLACED BY IMMIGRANT. Another deputationist said that he was a married man with five children. One girl was earning £2 a, week and another 14s; and that was all that was coming in. He was a seafaring man. bnt could not very . well- follow that occupation now, owing to defective vision. From 1903 to 1917 he worked on the wharves, and then he worked at the municipal milk depot, but was displaced by machinery. For two years he had worked with a local firm as under-storeman; but the other night he was told that he was not wanted, and he afterwards found that his place had been taken by a single man who had only been ifive days in the. Dominion, while he had been here twenty years. He thought that very hard. He had been all over the place Jooking for jobs, and could get nothing. He was paying 27s 6d a week rent, buying .his house with the rent. Mr Massey: Can you keep up your payments? Ho replied that he had been able to keep np the interest payments so far, but not the principal. POSITION OF TRADESMEN. Mr Kennedy eaid that tradesmen were not effected to such a great extent as the waterside workers, although when the furniture workers were out of a job they found it now very difficult to get work. He thought that, with cabinetmakers and carpenters, the high cost of timber and other building materials was fhe crux of,, the whole matter. Heart rimii had recently been put up 3s a hundred. : If-timber were cheaper, _ and carpenters fully employed, it would ■ unemployment amongst the cabinetmakers. The Cabinetmakers’ Union, to prevent its unemployed displacing, carpenters, was giving its men a pound a week to men who had been out of work four weeks; and that had eased the position somewhat. He had over four pages of unemployed in : their usual union hook. He hoped that the Government would do: its utmost to deal with the unemployed problem. ' , TRADE UNION PAY? Another deputationist urged that on relief works the men.ehould have trade Union pay and conditions, as it was not good for a young country like New Zealand to be known to have hundreds or thousands of men working for relief pay. If trade union conditions were,' observed, he was sure that would have the effect of bringing a lot of men out to this country; and, undbubtedly, as a young country, we did need population. He had been told by an electrical engineer that the Government could employ at least another 500 men at Mangahao in order to put the work through expeditiously. The Hon. J. G. Coates: I don’t know how they coul3 do I am sure. . The deputation suggested that the men oould bo put to work on "the Mangahao, tunnel, etc.; and urned that the work should he commeneea hs soon as possible on the Thorndbn sea-wall, as Wellington railway station was a disgrace to New Zealand. Could not the waterside workers : be given work on the sea-wall at trades union rates, when they were not employed on the waterfront. Then there was the repairing of Tinakori road, which was a disgrace to the city, and necessary work on the recreation grounds! Mr Massey; That is City Council work', Councillor Fraser. (Laughter.) The deputationist: Yes; I was going to give them a turn later on. (Laughter!) There was also the new Hntt road, the new tunnel to Kilbirnie, the painting of Government Buildings, and other work. The difficulty of finance, the finding of a million or two million pounds, should he easily over'comeyby a country which had lost some 16,000 men and raised tens of millions sterling for the war. Mr Fraser said, that there were some 300 other unemployed men outside the building, who could ; relate similar experiences. PREMIER IN REPLY DIFFICULT PROBLEM TO SOLVE The Prime Minister replied'that he did not need to teU the deputation that he was sorry to learn that there were 60 many unemployed in Wellington.’ It seemed to him to he worse than other centres in that respect, possibly because it was the centre of the country, and people flooked here in hard times. The great difficulty seemed to be that numbers of men in different parts of New Zealand, who had been employers till just lately, being able to provide employment for numbers of men until the prices of produce fell, and then they had not the money to do it, the men had to go, and most of them found their way to the centres of population. That was the real? trouble, and it was a difficult problem to solve. At the present time the Government had over- 7000 men : employed on public works—67oo under the Public Works Department itself, and another 600 in post office work, on telegraph lines and that sort of thing. The expenditure on public works—his friend here had said that the Government could find a few millions—would, so far Ss* he was able to judge, run into about six millions this year, including materials as well as labour. But on labour alone, when Ihe unemployed difficulty showed itself _ a few months ago, he told the Minister for Puhlio Works that he could find some £250;000 for meeting the problem. That, however, had nearly all gone. But the Government was not going to dismiss men. He was prepared to find another, £IOO,OOO- in the meantime; hut he was afraid that would not be enough. He just said that to show that he was not turning a deaf ear to the unemployed. One of' the speakers had' referred to his statement that he thought we had turned the corner. That wag pe, but you could not remedy the matter in a day or two. When the shearing and

other seasonal country work cam<along he thought that it would help to meet the difficulty. He had asked the Minister fpr Public Works hou many men he count find employment for now within a reasonable distance of Wellington; and he had told him that there was ono centre, Akitia, whore he could find employment for fifty men. In Wellington district alone the Government was now employing C3O who came under the heading of unemployed; and the Government would have to find work for some more. That was all there was in it. THE GREAT DIFFIOUI/L'V. The great difficulty was the married men. He did not mean to say that men should not get married. He thought they should. But the man who had to leave his wife and children and go into the country had a pretty hard row to hoe. A member of the deputation; He is burning the candle at both ends. The Prime Minister said that he was not going to say that they should have put by for a rainy day. The country had got to face the position as it was, and the Government tvas prepared to do its duty. If any of them were prepared to go into the country and take up ordinary pick-and-shovel work and so on, the Government prepared to find work. It was not going to stick at trifles. It would find the money somehow. He thought that in three or four weeks the position would improve. In fact, it was improving somewhat now. When he had heard the whistle going on the wharf every day he had thought that the things were brisk on the waterside. Deputationists: “Much of the work is done by machinery” and “it goes whether there is work for us or not. There are the permanent Harbour Board men at work.” There was a saying, said the Prime Minister. “Wait horse, and y<ju will get grass” ; and that seemed to be the position now. However, he was going to ask Mr Coates to say what he could do for. them; and he trusted it would be satisfactory. PUBLIC WORKS MINISTER SINGLE MEN FOR THE COUNTRY. Mr Coates asked whether married men could go out of town at all. The idea of the Public Works Department was to ship single men out into the country, and thus make room for married men nearer town. He had work that could employ • fifty or sixty men now, but not near town. He could not say anything about the sea-wall, as it was not in his department. Mr Massey: That’s an engineering The Harbour Board and the city engineers had been working at it for a long time-past, and the last report is that they will soon be able to oommsnee the work. But I can’t say when. It is simply a difficult problem that must be solved before the work can commence. Mr Coates added that - the department could take married men at Rimutaka, Akatarawa, Horokiwi, and a very few at Masterton, and some at Mangahao. But there were a number of looal unemployed at Mastertoii. One speaker had suggested that many more men could he put on at the Mangahao tunirel; but they could only work at each end of • the tunnel, and three shifts at that. He could, however, employ, a few masons and artisans, and a few rough carpenters at Mangahao. Mr Massey : You may be able to fix our m|ison friend here at Mangahao. WORK FOR 50 TO 100. Mr Coates: That is 50, 60, or 100 we could find work for easily. If married men could take such work on until they could get something better, something handier, he could snip them off to-morrow. A deputation'ist: *o ulu you not use your influence with the City Council to induce it to carry on necessary works in the city? Mr Coates: You know that if I went to the Mayor, he would tell me to mind my own business. It is about the only opportunity he gets. (Laughter.) He added that he had discussed the matter with Mr Wright, and he knew that the M a yor and the City Council were very anxious to do all tney could to cope with the difficulty. It was a time when every employer should do all he could to help the Government at this time. He could take 50 men tomorrow. Mr Glover: What rate of pay would that he at? Mr Coates: It would be the relief works rate. A deputationist: That is the difficulty. It is hardly enough to keep body and soul together. A married man with five children under thirteen years of age said that he Could not think of going out into the country at_l2s a day and keep two homes. There were several outside in the same position as himself. 1 Mr Coates: We have tried to get the Public Works Department to employ at standard rates as many married men as possible; but we could not turn, down single men who have been fith the department many years. He was sure they would not ask it. (Hear, hear.) , GOVERNMENT AND CITY COUNCIL Mr Fraser: Could not the Government consult with the engineer’s department of the City Council, and get them to say how many married men they could absorb, because the question of the loan would be. up that evening. Thanks to the Minister for Internal Affaira, whose legislation had gone through and had given the council a chance, he understood that £IO,OOO would be available practically at onoe, if the Minister for Public Works would only take hold of the job and organise the matter. ' Mr Coates said there would be no difficulty about that. He would get (he Labour Department and the Public Works Department to consult with the city engineer’s department to decide how many men they could take, and tell them how many the Government could take. They could provide for the married men, and the single men could go to the backblocks. It must be understood, however, that the relief works Were to meet the temporary difficulty only. Mr Fraser: Thank you very much. If the Government will take the matter up with the City Council that would help very, very much. ,