CORRESPONDENCE.

Waipawa Mail, Volume 2, Issue 133, 20 December 1879, Page 3

CORRESPONDENCE.

[We do not hold ourselves responsible for the opinions expressed by our correspondents] (to the editor or the wait aw a hail.) Bib, —An attempt has been made this season by certain woolgrowers in Basrke's Bay to indemnify themselves •gainst the declining prices of wool by reducing the wages of the shearers. Accordingly, we find advertisements for shearers to work for 15s per 100, and letters in the newspapers advising the men to accept the reduced rate. Nos, although it may be very natural for employers to desire their work done as cheaply as possible, it is neither just nor reasonable that the workmen should suffer the loss occasioned by depreciation in the value of the sta[<ic ; and I assert that under present conditions, the wages of shearers in this province have already reached a minimum. Let me remind these gentlemen that so long as they occupy such extensive tracts of country for purely pastoral purposes, they effectually shut out the influx of a laboring population ; that their shearing season occupies but two or at moat three months in the year; that they have no work to give out for the remaining nine or ten ; and that many of the men who work in their sheds have ridden hundreds of miles to obtain a few weeks' employment. It is, besides, asserted in one of these letters that a moderately good shearer can make excellent wages at 15s per 100. Now, a moderately good shearer avenges some 40 or 50 a day, and hardly works on an average four davs in the week, for sheep can only be shorn in fine weather; so, in fact, unless a man is something more than a moderately good shearer, he will hardly make enough during the season to tide him over the rigour of a Hawke's Bay winter. The high prices which ruled a few years ago gave a stimulus to woolgrowing in all countries of the world where the natural pastures were rich and the population scanty, and we are now suffering from the inevitable reaction. The cause of low prices is OTer-production, and the remedy is in the hands of our woolgrowers themselves. They possess oue of the finest agricultural countries in the world, —a country which Nature never intended for the exclusive production of wool and tallow. Let them devote some of their attention, and some of their capital, to agricultural pursuits, or part with the superfluous portions of their overgrown estates to men who have energy ant* capital to utilise them. Then and not till then will a laboring population be encouraged to settle within the province, and tho consequent reduction in the necessaries of life, and the assurance of permanent employment, enable the employer to demand and the workman to accept a reduced rate of wages. —I am, Ac., SHEARER.