STATE SERVICES’ APPEAL

Taranaki Daily News, 14 April 1932, Page 7

STATE SERVICES’ APPEAL

WAGES CUTS SHORT-SIGHTED

OTHER ALTERNATIVES ADVISED.

REDUCED PURCHASING POWER. NO DESIRE TO SHIRK THEIR DUTY. .jSy Telegraph.—Press Association. Welington, April 13. A meeting of delegates of the Wellington branches of the State employees’ organisations carried a resolution strongly appealing to the Government to refrain from further instituting “a shortsighted policy of reducing the purchasing power of the workers of the Dominion, which can lead only to disaster to the State and community as a whole, particularly to the business section and farmers, owing to consequent extensive destruction of the local market and tho huge increase in the already large army of unemployed men and women.” The resolution urges that in some departments retrenchment has bgen so severe as to affect efficiency; that the withholding of the annual increments of tho younger members of the State services constitutes a breach of contract and throws an inequitable burden on the shoulders of those least able to bear it; that the Government adopt the constructive measures already advocated by the Dominion executives of the State employees’ organisations and workers generally, instead of "out-of-date proposals that assuredly must bring ruin and disaster to pur country.” An assurance is given that in passing the resolution the State employees are not actuated by a spirit of selfishness or a desire to shirk a fair share of the common burden, or unduly to harass the Government, but by loyalty to the country and the great traditions of tho pioneers who “sought to establish a State that would provide a bright, wholesome lesson to civilisation and which, as the result, became for many years the wonder and envy of other countries, an ideal from which it is whole-heartedly regretted that those in authority are seeking to depart.”