THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1908. COTTON TRADE DISPUTE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3038, 7 November 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1908. COTTON TRADE DISPUTE.

The cables this morning indicate that there is a prospect of an early settlement of the Lancashire cotton trade dispute. The lock-out, which began on September 19th, has rendered nearly 500,000 persons idle. The unions are very strong financially, and profess to be able to hold out for a long time. The cardroom workers had a reserve of £250,000 when the strike began, and are paying strike pay at the rate of 12s a week for men, 8s for women, and 6s for girls. The Operative Spinners' Amalgamation had a reserve of £600,000. The cotton-spinner is described by a writer in the London "Daily Mail" as an aristocrat among craftsmen. He earns from £2 10s to £3 5s a week, according to the class of fabric ho turns out. No industry is more highly specialised, and in the production of fine, hardwearing, and perfectly even yarn Lancashire leaves foreign rivals far behind. The spinner does not con sider himself highly paid, when the skill required and the long training necessary are taken into account.

Nobody can become an efficient spinner who starts learning the trade later than fifteen years of age. Before a man is promoted to be a spinner he is generally required to invest from £2OO upwards in the mill. The work is very intricate, necessitating elaborate calculation, and the average Lancashire lad is fully alive to the value of technical education as a means of making himself more efficient. Lads who have risen at five in the morning and have worked till five at night accept it as the understood thing to attend evening classes, and do it cheerfully. Of course, such a passion for work has its reverse side. Such is the strain upon the the nerves caused by work in the cotton-spinning rooms of a cctton mill that, while a mechanical engineer is estimated on the average to last thirty years, the spinner lasts on the average only twenty-four.