LABOR TROUBLES.

Feilding Star, Volume XVI, Issue 187, 7 February 1895, Page 2

LABOR TROUBLES.

— ♦ The Ministry threaten the country with another " grievous murrain " next session ; they promise ua oneman one-vote in Municipalities. The direct effect of this change will be to restrict the investment of capital in new buildings, and the improvement ' of old ones. It will mean probably a thousand more carpenters, plumbers, masons, and general laborers, thrown out of employment, and for what purpose ? asks the Wairarapa Daily Times. According to Mr Reeves, it is to compel a universal Saturday half holiday. It is criminal on the part of the Government, at a time when trade is depressed, and the Colony ill able to afford disturbing legislation of this kind, to force it upon us. The Colony can stagger under low prices and bad seasons, but if the Govern ment will insist upon worrying it with unnecessary and disastrous changes it must accept the responsibility of the further depression which it is deliberately bringing about. In this connection a settler who has been for years a large employer of labor of all kinds, informed us yesterday that in the whole of his experience he never saw so many reallj' good men out of work. Whoro, a few yeara ago, he would have a difficulty of gelting ton, be could now get a hundred men "But," he said, " unluckily, I do not want them, the recent legislation has made it positively impossible to wpeud money with any degree of safely in the employment of labor."