EATING LESS BREAD

Taranaki Daily News, 13 October 1934, Page 8

EATING LESS BREAD

THE TENDENCY IN BRITAIN. NEW PROCESSES RESPONSIBLE. Concern about the fact that less bread is eaten in Great Britain than was the case a few years ago was expressed at the annual conference of the Amalgamated Union of Operative Bakers, "Confectioners and Allied Workers at Leicester, recently. Mr. J. H. Keen, London, the president, said that the sale of bread in Britain was at least 15 per cent, less than in 1920. That had an effect upon the standard of 'employment in bakeries. Speaking as one who had been all his life in the trade, he added: “It is very difficult to find any kind of bread that compares with the bread of 30 years ago." That was largely due to the treatment of flour during the process of milling. Another reason was that the last 15 years had witnessed the introduction of new processes of breadmaking, and there was a tendency to believe that they had gone too far along the lines of mass production of bread. Mr. Keen complained of the unsatisfactory conditions prevailing in London, where, in some bakeries, he said, people were working ten hours a day and 16 to 18 hours at the week-end without proper meal times. The biggest evil the union had to face was the steady and sure growth of baking on seven nights a week. In London there were hundreds of such places. Employers were taking advantage of economic circumstances to force people to work seven nights a week without extra payment. At the same time the way that some employers overworked boy and girl labour in this trade, said Mr. Keen, would be a disgrace to a race of Hottentots. There was no excuse at all for the employment of boys and girls in the trade. Mr. W. Banfield, M.P., the general secretary, said that he would not like it to go out that everybody employed in the baking industry worked under toe bad conditions described. Their own members for the most part had conditions of labour of which the

union had no reason to be ashamed. Sweating in the baking trade was carried on among non-union labour by unscrupulous employers.