Farmers and Wages

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 19982, 6 July 1939, Page 14

Farmers and Wages

Sir, —Mr. Graham’s apology to farm workers makes amusing reading. Truly they are doing a great service for a very small remuneration, and little prospect of anything worth-while in the future. Their ranks are made a.p mostly of young single men, who will find it difficult to support a family while they are at their present occupati on. Mr. Graham wishes the public to believe that transport workers, slaughtermen, and waterside workers are getting the cream of the farm production, and are not giving value for their money. I have never heard of workers in any of these groups having retired to live on the interest of their savings, nor do I see the names of their wives and daughters figuring in the society notes as being on an extended tour of the British Isles or the Continent, or of having visited the World Fair. No, Mr. Graham is on the wrong track and is trying to find a scapegoat. Mr. Fanner never suggests in public that he is the gentleman who is slipping on the job, that the good old soil is tired of being mismanaged, and is not prepared to yield as of old: that more work is required to get results, different methods of farming, more paddocks, better fencing, more shelter belts, more care in breeding for wool production, and to eliminate cull stock: in fact, more time and work and money spent on the farm, and leas off it. On the other hand, farm production goes to balance our overseas trade, exports against imports, exports which over the past eight years have only been produced at a profit for two seasons, with imports which pay handsome profits to manufacturers, shipping firms, insurance companies and importers—a state of affairs that is most undesirable and cannot be remedied by interfering with wages here, but can to some extent by supporting a policy of industrial expansion and an increasing population, whereby our own produce will be used to greater extent in this country and our industries will provide against the need to import. In the meantime, Mr. Francis Stafford’s suggestion in a recent publication. J‘to see what the Government can do,” is well worth trying. SERIOUS.