LABOR IN AUSTRALIA.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4896, 2 October 1901, Page 4

LABOR IN AUSTRALIA.

An article appearing in a recent Dumber of the Brisbane 'Worker,' shows that there was very good ground for the fear of the Labor Unions that the inclusion of this colony in the Commonwealth would bare had a very disastrous effect on aome of our local industries. If New Zealand had ' federated,' it would, of course, have had to admit tuQ uiaQU* factures of the Australian States free of duty, and what this would have meant so far as the boot trade is concerned is graphically' described by the Queensland journal. Between fire and six hundred employees in Brisbane, it says, in spite of the most strenuous efforts, are unable to earn an uveTagß of thirty sbiilings a week. Many of these poor fellows are married men with wives and children depending upon them. What thirty shillings a week must mean under such circumstances may be, safely left to the imagination. After the landloxd has been paid — and bis share of the pittance comes to about oneCourth of the weekly dole — there can scarcely be enough left to buy shoddy clothes and adulterated food for the boot operative and h\d family. And yet people talk about the thriftlessness of the working classes ! In the year 1899 887 males and 363 females were employed in the boot trade in Queensland, a total of 1250 souls. Of the 887 males, no fewer than 386 were bojs, whose average earnings were 135. 6 d a week. The 501 men earned an averag of £1 17s 8d a week and this, it must be remembered, includes the wages of foreman at £3 or £4 a week. Of the females 138 worked for a weekly wage of 19e lid, while five on piecework earned 13s 9d a week, and 220 girls averaged 7s 9d a week. Think of that, 7s 9d a week! Altogether the males averaged £1 8s 9d a week, and the fe males 10a 9d. The girls are pitted against the women, and the boys against the men. When a boy serves bis apprenticeship he bae cfae option of either continuing to do a man's work at a boy's wage or being turned adrift. In the boot trade, more than in any other trade, perhaps, the fine art of human exploitation reaches its highest stage of fiendish perfection. Human flesh and blood is sweated in. to every stitch and every nail driven into most of the boots manufactured in Queensland. And tho process t>f squeezing the life's blood more and more out of these poor men and boys and women and girls grows more and more acute from year to year. If New Zealand had thrown in her lot with the Australian Commonwealth, she would have had to accept the products of this sweated labor without any ' protective ' duties, and sooner or later her own work-people would i have had to submit to the same conditions or to abandon the industry to the * free labor ' of her rivals. Tbe bootmakers, at anyrate, have reason \ to be grateful to the politicians who have saved them from such an unpleasant dilemma.