“HELPS” AT A PREMIUM.

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2372, 8 November 1870, Page 2

“ HELPS” AT A PREMIUM.

“What/’ exclaimed a lady in Greymouth a day or two since to a young woman who had' answered her advertisement for a do* mestic ; “ twenty-live shillings a week for doing housework in the morning and carry* iug out a baby in the afternoon, when the weather is line-it is too much, _ people cau|t afford to pay such wages." “If people can t afford to pay such wages ma’am,” says the girl, “ people must do without servants. As for taking out a baby—l object to babies or baby-hawking. 1 won’t go anywhere in town for less than twenty-live shillings a week. If I likes to go np country a hit I can get thirty-live shillings a week.” And this is only too true of Greymouth. A res spectable servant girl is a ram avis, and a luxury which very few people can afford to indulge in Now for the alternative. “ I must do the work myself,” says the lady of the establishment, “and get a charwoman once a week.” And what does the char, woman say? “Ten shillings a day inarm J always gets—and vittles. I couldn’t come for no less on no account.” This is also true of Greymouth—ten shillings a day for a very red-faced woman who takes off her bonnet in the kitchen at somewhere about nine o’clock in the morning, and puts it on again a little before six in the evening, and after having gone into two hearty meals of meat, vegetables, and sundries, with two good drinks of beer and perhaps one of spirits, she holds out her hand for ten shillings, which she receives as if she had done one a very considerable favor, which must not he too frequently asked to be repeated. There is no part of New Zealand that we have heard of where female help is so scarce .and highpriced as in Greymouth. The consequence is that a number of girls, hardly beyond their early childhood, are pressed into domestic service, to the utter neglect of their education and home training. And the wages 'demanded by the mothers of children for holding a baby, the best part of the time head downwards, or for looking at it rolling in a puHdle or drowninu in a swamp is something absolutely ludicrous. A case was related to us only yesterday. The mother of an infant, having' to serve through the day in her husband’s shop, applied for a little girl to “ hold baby and tidy np things in the day.” “I can’t let her come under ten shillings a week and her meals,” says the girl’s mother. “And she must come home of nights, because she has to light the fire and get her father’s breakfast ready in the morning.” The girl was just ton years of age, and, of course, knew nothing. So twenty-six pounds a year, besides the cod of feeding it, has to be paid for such insigniiicant help. This is more than an agricultural laborer will get in some of the home counties, who has a wife and family to support.