UNEMPLOYMENT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19443, 31 October 1925, Page 8

UNEMPLOYMENT

(To the Editor)

Sir, —The liquor people lare tremendously exercised about the unemployment that they say will result if prohibition becomes law as a consequence of the vote on November 4. They’re not in earnest about this question any more thaij about any other question—except their profits. They’re in deep and deadly earnest about that. Well, most people know that certain breweries U year or two ago joined forces, and whereas in 1922 there were 1048 persons employed in the breweries of the Dominion, in 1924 there were only 947. From which is seems that the combine employed 74 fewer persons in 1924 than in 1922. What happened to these 74 people? History is silent about them, but it is fair to assume that they were absorbed into the industry of the country, just as the whole 947 will be if the breweries close the doors on June 30 next. God grant it! What I want to emphasise is that when it suits their book to turn men off, the brewing industry has no thought for its employees: it is only when a prohibition poll is in sight that it becomes so sweetly solicitous for them.

In the three yefers that have elapsed since last election no fewer than 22,115 persons have come into the hands of the’ police for being in a drunken condition in the public streete, of whom 13,602 did so for the first time —4,535 new drunkards a year, over a dozen a day! Will New Zealand keep this thing going? Surely not! Very solicitous about the loss of employment of brewery men—what about the loss of employment of these 22,000 people? Oh, that is in the wlay of business, and we can’t afford to be tender-hearted in the liquor business —except once in three years. Since January, of the present year, 5,283 immigrants have come to New Zealand from the Old Country, and every one of them has ben taken on in one or another of tho Dominion’s industries. What is 974 compared with that? If prohibition becomes law next year there will be such an increase in general prosperity that employers will be tumbling over each other for men, just as it is in America to-day. And America seems to be the only place in the world where such is the case. One of the L.V.A. posters says that America has "burnt her fingers.”—l lain, ete r JAMES AITKEN.