RATES OF PAY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4544, 4 March 1942, Page 3

RATES OF PAY

AGRICULTURAL WORKERS “ I am quite sure that we have to drive home to the townspeople of this •country that the agricultural worker cannot be paid a reasonable living wage unless you are willing to pay a reasonable price for the food he helps to produce, and unless you are willing to put his employer in a position not merely to cultivate his land, but to maintain it in a proper state of fer-

tility. That is the essential of the whole matter. “ It was the cry of cheap food that depressed agricultural wages and kept them depressed. Cheap food, on the importation of which that cry was based, meant sweated labour, and, above all, sweated land in the primary producing countries overseas, and it was, incidentally, also responsible for much of the curtailment of our export trade and much of the consequent unemployment, “ If, after the war, we look forward to a revival of international exchange

| and are to depend for the employment i of large numbers of people on the reI vival of the export trade, our greatest interest must.be to see that the great consuming countries that buy our goods are prosperous, and they are 1 primarily agricultural countries. They can be prosperous only if we are will ing to pay them a decent price for the food they send us, to enable them not only to cultivate their land, but also to maintain it in a. proper state of fertility.” Mr Hudson, British Minister of Agriculture, in a recerit Commons debate.