Labor Notes

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XIX, Issue 6477, 21 September 1892, Page 4

Labor Notes

There are 6,500 men employed at the ChicHgo World's Fair. A big Sydney firm the other day dispensed with the services of 100 hands in one act ; another discharged seventy. German trade statistics for 1891 show that wages have been reduced in 229 towns, that a rise hud been secured in sevon cases only, and that the cost of living had been going up all round. The females employed at one of the principal hotels at Broken Hill, on being called upon to submit to a reduction of wages, donned their hats, and went on strike. Pickets were stationed round the premises to prevent other girls from filling the vacancies. The workpeople at Homestead (snys an English paper) are not foreigners, but American citizenß and voters, most of them of German, English, Irish and Yankee birth Outside of the 800 laborers whose pay is but7d ;m hour, the majority of the 4,600 men in the Carnegie mills receive not less than L 3 per week. There are hundreds whose pay averages more than L 4, but tho men claim that these | wages are one-third lower than those paid j by competing mills. : The aborigines who struck against a reduction in wages at the Duaringa Eucalyptus Works are still holding out. The local paper Bays that the entire tribe camo marching in procession into Duaringa, carrying an effigy of Uncle Tom (the boss of the job), which was every now and again hooted at in tho most approved fashion. Afterwards they returned to their camp and held a grand corroboree, and at the close, amid the most frightful yells of exultation, burned the effigy of Uncle Tom. According to a Melbourne contemporary the farmers in the Benalla district have lately had unpleasant experiences with the unemployed. A number of these men were given work at clearing land at 12s 6d per week and their keep, and as soon as they earned a few pounds they gave notice to leave and of their intention to return to the city. Some of them were offered contract work, by which they could have earned 16s a week and their keep, but they declined ; consequently the work was given to Chinese. Mr Henderson, superintending inspector of factories and workshops, gives a melancholy account of the conditions and prospects of the Lancashire cotton industries. It is estimated that more money has been lost in Lancashire in these trades duriug tho past twelve months than in any year yet recorded. In Oldham alone it is believed that the losses on a quarter's working will not be less than LIOO,OOO. The explanation is found in the fluctuations which have taken place in the value of raw material. In 1890 the American cotton crop was poor in quality, but exceptionally abundant. The result was a serious drop in prices, and spinners who had been accustomed for sever.il years in succession to do well by buying cotton early in the season have, during the pnst year, been caught, and have had to face a falling market for the raw material and a stagnation market for the manufactured article. A deputation representing the Sydney unemployed waited upon the Minister of Works recently to placo before the Government suggestions for permanently relieving the present distress — the establishment of village settlements, the carrying out of public works on the co-opera-tive system instead of the contract system, and the clearing off of Crown lands. Mr Lyne said that under no circumstances could he approve of the proposal to abolish contractors, and carry out public works on the co-operative principle. He pointed out that he hud gone ns far as a pjudent Minister could go in pushing on with public works, and that he had rushed into the winter of this year more work than had ever before been put in hand durin? one winter. As to nutting the unemployed to work in clearing Crown lands, he said that tive or six years ago an experiment was tried at a cost of a couple of hundred thousand pounds, but the hind was now as thickly covered with scrub as ever. Then, in the matter of village settlement, the Minister of Lands was already possessed of powers for the subdivision of land and for the lease of small blocks at a merely nominal rental. Mr Lyne added that only those whose life had been in such a channel could make a living out of land cultivation. M. Deschanel, a rising deputy, was sent to the United States (writes the Paris correspondent ot the Age) to examine and report upon the working of the labor problem in that hive of 60,000,000 of workers. He has discovered nothing new to Britishers, save, perhaps, his assertion that the American wage-earner expends more of his salary on his house and clothing — keeping up appearances — than on his stomach. He considers the horologists of Waltham, Mass., to be the highest type of artisan prosperity. Their homes arc luxurious, their clothing masher-like. The female workers, on leaving the factory, wear the latest Parisian fashions in bonnets, and they have their hands gloved like a duchess. The deputy attributes the low cost of industrial products to the vastness of the machinery employed and the improvements constantly introduced into it. The American inherits all the ideas of trades unionism, independence of State interference, and full reliance on liberty of action from his English ancestors, and marches parallel with his British cousins in the conquest of new fields of well-being and the discovery of fresh paths of progress. Both people constitute the AngloSaxon race, which holds the future of the world in the hollow of its hand. Let other peoples try to keep up with the running ; to stand still would be certain extinction.

At a recent Board School examination for girla (says a Home paper) one of the tasks was an essay on boys, and this was one of the compositions, just as it was handed in by a j^irl of 12 :— " The boy is nob an animal, yet they can be heard to a considerable distance. When a boy hollers he opens his big mouth like frogs, but girls hold th'tir toung till they are spoke to, and then answer respectable and tell just how it was. A boy thinks himself clever because he can wade where it is deep, but God made the dry land for every living thing, and rested on the seventh day. Wen the boy grows up he is called a husband, and then he stops wading and stays out at night, but the grewup girl is a widow and keeps house." When some young boys informed a man on Prince's Bridge, Melbourne, that one of their companions had fallen into the river, he calmly said, " I will go and tell a policeman. I couldn't possibly miss tho next train for the races, as I have something specially good for the first race." The man went to the races, and the boy was drowned before a constable arrived. The Victorian Minister for Mines has granted a departmental certificate for bravery to a young miner named Henry Bathurst, who recently descended a shaft to recover the body of a miner who had been suffocated by foul air. Bathurst, who succeeded in tying the corpse to himself, was unconscious when brought to the surface. " The Pelican Club has gone bankrupt, and the sumptuously fitted house in Gerrard street has closed its doors," writes a London correspondent. " The Booths, of the Salvition Army, mean to turn the Bcenes of hilarious carousings galore, into a poor man's barracks. The snores and gurgles of human wreckage will henceforward resound through halls where Pelicans chorused " Ballyhooley,' whore Arthur Roberta put • the dotlet on his i,' and where Peter Jackson 'laid out ' Jem Smith"

A knocking fatal accident took place near VVinfcon, Southland, last week. A young man, formerly a seaman, wa« killed on the farm of Mr James Thomson, two miles south of Winton. He was driving a team of horses yoked to a spading harrow, and was jerked off the seat, falling in front of the spade discs, which mangled him terribly. Dr. Riley was at once sent for, but a few minutes afterwards another messenger arrived to say that he was not required, as the poor man had expired. His name could not be ascertained.