Does Industry Suffer ?

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 665, 17 May 1929, Page 8

Does Industry Suffer ?

APPRENTICES AND CAMP PAY EMPLOYERS of apprenticed youths are complaining vehemently because. when the boys go into military camp, they are entitled to collect full wages as well as military pay. Workers’ representatives on apprenticeship committees in Auckland explain that the boy, as well as the employer, frequently suffers hardship when the military camp calls him from his bench or his machine.

A prosecution which was brought against a firm in the South last week was grasped by the employers as an opportunity to show how industry suffered in inconvenience and financial loss when its workers were called away to fulfil their military obligations. Six apprentices had been sent to camp, and none of them had been paid their wages as prescribed by law. “The most unjust taxation to which employers are subject,” the general manager of the prosecuted company described it from the witness-bo?, when complaining of the late Government’s failure to answer a persistent prayer for relief. “As a principle,” he said, “provision for military training is a question for the State, and the cost should be spread as equally as possible over the whole community. This principle is, however, very far from being applied in New Zealand. “An employer of apprentices and juniors has to put up with the disorganisation of his business and the inconvenience of having them taken away from their employment for certain periods every year, and he has also to pay them full wages while they are in camp. In addition to this, he has to contribute his share toward the taxation from which the Government derives its funds. APPEAL TO STATE “Actually, the employer of apprentices is asked to pay three times—in taxation, in loss and inconvenience due to the absence of his employees in camp, and in actual wages.” Furthermore, the employer pointed out that State departments, according to certain named regulations and Gazette notices, provided that no pay is given to publie servants attending military camps unless they forgo their military pay, or vice versa. This, the employers claimed, showed that the Government recognised the principle of affording relief only so far as it applied to its own services. It was asked that the Government should either grant relief to the employers on the same lines as the privileges given State departments, or, alternatively, pay the boys their full wages while they were in camp.

The magistrate who heard this plea wisely swept aside its controversial features. “It is too political,” he said naively, and discussed it no further. During the recent apprenticeship conference at Wellington this question was raised, and in the discussion the employers’ representatives agreed that, when a youth was in camp, his military pay would he subsidised by the employer up to the full amount of his weekly wage. This was not acceptable to the advocates of the boys’ welfare, however, and the conference did not reach unanimity. The workers’ viewpoint, as explained in Auckland, is that when the boy is taken away from his work to attend camp he frequently suffers hardship and inconvenience similarly with his boss, and that to deprive him of the few shillings comprising his weekly earnings would accentuate an already acute economic situation. BOYS SUPPORT FAMILIES “Many of the boys are the only wage-earners in their families,” one man said, “and with them every penny is a prisoner. I have boys on my books who have to help in the support of their mothers and sisters, and in some cases their fathers are also out of work. Others have to supplement their meagre wage by working on side-line occupations, such as orchestral work and the like, in the evenings. “When these boys go to camp, they lose their side-line pay as it is—a loss for which the military pay does not compensate—and cannot afford to lose their weekly wage as welL “It is true, as the magistrate said, that the explanation of the employers was a political one, but that does not relieva industry of its obligation to meet the requirements of its employees in the maintenance of their standard of living.” "In some cases, I admit, the extra pay for the boys means more cigarettes for a few weeks, but a few examples of this sort cannot be avoided. In the main, the boys need the money, and, according to law, are entitled to it.”