Evening Post. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1929. JILL AND JACK

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 134, 3 December 1929, Page 10

Evening Post. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1929. JILL AND JACK

The problem of parents who can place daughters in typewriting and similar employment at £2 10s a week, but who cannot find a place for sons at £1 ss, continues. Thirty years ago boys could enter positions that have since been found adaptable to girls. Boys could at least use these positions as a bridge between leaving school and attaining that point at which the male brain begins to develop steadiness. There is a stage— the age differs in different individuals—at which boys suddenly pick up a sense of proportion and an idea of direction in which to proceed. But that stage seldom coincides with school-leaving age, and in the dim forgotten past there were plenty of small jobs in which boys could shelter for a while and complete their sometimes slow adolescence. But now they have been competed out of the typewriting style of job; the girls have crowded on to the bridge, and for this kind of work they are, it is contended, superior to boys. They often make their job worth over £3 and even over £4, and, though it may have no future, they stand temporarily at any rate in economic security, while the boys still knock at the door. Outstripped by the feminine hare, what is the male tortoise to do? He can hardly look forward to marriage as a means of economic escape from a blind alley; and, if he takes thought for the future, jobs like nayyying seem to be closed to him. It is not absolutely certain that nawying is as bad as it appears, because, in spite of machinery, the day may come when the competent navvy will be among the most scarce and wanted of labourers; but our social-industrial ideas are set on a higher plane, and there is no present desire to quarrel with them, so long as the "coat-on" notion does not spread beyond bounds. For similar reasons other blind alley work is excluded when the "proficiency" boy begins to plan his career.

If he turns to trades, he is faced with limitation of the proportion of apprentices, or at any rate with the competition of many others knocking at the door. In former years girl competition on the scale now evident was not dreamed of. Also, the price of a boy was so low that the meanest employer might be induced to give a bright-looking lad a chance. "Give him five shillings a week and fire him if he is no good." If he proved to be good, but only just good, his pay would rise yearly at about half-a-crown a week. (These figures are facts; sometimes the start would be at half-a-crowh a week, not five shillings.) But occasionally the boy would prove to be specially good, and then he would shoot up rapidly, for the old system was elastic enough to give special ability a chance. Now, however, everything tends to be machined out to dead levels. The old starting rates (or their modern money equivalent) are not to be tolerated, and wages are fixed above the sweat line. No longer is a boy offered five shillings a week, and the message boys drawing twenty shillings or more seem to be much better off. But to what extent is twenty shillings in 1929 superior to five shillings in 1899 if you could get the latter in those days and cannot get the former in these days? Many men who have become very successful after a five shillings a week start are now pondering how to place boys—and good boys—who find the avenues to the professions and the indentured trades blocked, miscellaneous callings thronged with girlsgood girls, too!—and the hard work jobs more or less threatened with those labour-saving changes that are peculiar to the machine and mass production age. In New Zealand there seem to he only two potential labour-demands of any magnitude—the' farm and the secondary industry. The latter has hardly yet arrived. Its arrival is dependent on higher protection, which is not yet a settled question of policy; and however urgent it may be to face that issue, a paltering and faltering three-partyism seems to be in no hurry to do so. Farming, however, is a natural industry. True, its labour factor has not increased in proportion with its production-values, and the Year-Book figures suggest that machinery (especially electrical) has displaced hands, mostly women. But if the volume of farming could be very much increased, undoubtedly its employing power must also increase, perhaps not in the same proportion, yet in sufficient volume to relieve the labour surplus. To put it conversely, the diversion of surplus labour to the land ought to yield results good enough to stimulate farming, and therefore to stimulate rural employment. And it is because the land represents the greatest potential source of strength available at the moment that we note with special interest Dr. F. W. Hilgendorf's contribution to the Canterbury discussion (reported yesterday) on 'Choice of Career for Boys." Speaking as a Professor of Lincoln College, Dr. Hilgendorf did not try to gild the farmer's life; it was not a^ simple vocation, he said, nor a get-rich-quick one. He might have added

that a farm hand sees far more of mud and hard work than of the "culture" identified with motion pictures and night clubs; that hours are long, and that many farmer-employ-ers are narrow. Yet Dr. Hilgendorf can mention scores of farmers who have set themselves up solidly, if not sensationally, by means of experience and savings stored during a decade as farm hands, and by means of the financial support of stock and station firms (sometimes too little respected) who help a man of proved character. The 15s or 20s a week on the farm is not big pay, yet it is better pay than idleness. A' boy who chooses to be a farm-hand, with a will to rise, should decide first of all whether he has in him the mettle to stand years of toil and of waiting and probably of injustice. Small ° pay does not hold back a boy of character if he is prepared to rough it, but on the latter point he should be entirely candid with himself— he should choose between "Broadway" and broad acres. After ten years away from the pleasure halls— can he do its'—he may start definitely on a career in which he has a mortgagee but not necessarily a master. He can become his own boss. He has the pride of being a producer, instead of driving a pen. And he also has the pride of knowing that he is engaged at the point of production where his country and the world most need him.