UNEMPLOYMENT AND MIDDLE AGE.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 236, 5 October 1928, Page 6

UNEMPLOYMENT AND MIDDLE AGE.

Among tlie numerous unemployed citizens of Auckland there are a goodly number of thoroughly respectable men—active, capable and refined. In fact they are just the very men you would not expect to find looking for work. Mostly middle aged and elderly, some of these men are suffering in silence acute privations. Why are they thus treated? Many of them are the victims of commercial injustice. It seems very strange that, as most of the employers profess Christianity in some form or other, they shouid at the same time worship a fetish set up by themselves, assisted no doubt by their mentors. Whenever these unfortunate middle-aged and elderly—in many , cases hungry—men offer themselves for employment they are promptly told by either manager or employer that younger men are wanted. What are they to do? One would have thought, quite apart from any other consideration than business, an elderly man to be a better asset. In the elderly man you will in most cases find tact, consideration, refinement; while in many of the young men of to-day these qualities are entirely absent, their place being taken by an affectation of knowledge they do not possess, coupled with the attributes of bounce and bluff, and perhaps also a tendency to bully—qualities the world would be better without. Of course,the young should have the utmost consideration accorded them, but not to the undue exclusion of the middle-aged and elderly. All have to live, but the present miserable, half-starved state ef the middle-aged and elderly unemployed professional man is not living, only existing. If this practice of getting rid of elderly, righteous and conscientious "gentlemen" is permitted to grow as at present a very serious and perhaps menacing state of things will arise in this country. AXTI-FETISHIST.