FIT AT NINETY-SIX.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 229, 27 September 1928, Page 8

FIT AT NINETY-SIX.

HARDY WATERSIDER.

PERIOD OF WORKING I.IFE.

DIFFICULTIES OF FIXATION, -r

'We lia.ve always hesitated to attempt to fix the duration of a man's working life. I don't know that we have any authority to do so, except in cases where a man, before an accident lias been suffering from a disease, and the medical evidence is that his life will be only two or three years."

This i observation was made in the Arbitration Court this morning by Mr. Justice Frazer in apportioning compensation in a case that concerned a labourer who was 08 years of age. It was suggested that the man had little work in front of him, even if he were in; normal health.

In cases such as he had illustrated, said his Honor, the Court could always say that the duration of a man's working life would be three years, and at the end of that time he would be no worse off. The suggestion that the plaintiff in the present action had reached the end of his working days recalled to mind the case of a wharf labourer in Wellington who toiled till he was 96. He was of unusual extraction, his parents being Irish on one side and Dutch Boer on the other, and that possibly accounted for his physical ability at euch an advanced age. In any case, there were men at ninety doing work that one .would imagine would be well ■•■beyond.their years.