Cement and Labor

Hokitika Guardian, 21 May 1921, Page 4

Cement and Labor

The transition from no men to no money was rapid enough, blit the transition from no cement to too much ?ement lias almost taken Sir Francis Bell’s breath away, says the “Evening Post.” And no wonder.- There is something rotten in industrial commercial organisation when house-building is held up this week for lack of cement, and when cement works close down next week for lack of house-building. The further one examines the cement anomaly, the less convincing is the argument based on the relative importance ol material cost and labour cost in housebuilding. The material cost in building houses may be relatively higher than the material cost of planting trees in waste sand dunes. But much of the material cost of house-building resolves itself into labour cost, because the production of the cement entails the employment of many men—at Golden Bay alone-120, about 70 of them married—and the other materials not imported also include a big proportion of New Zealand-earned wages. Timber, for instance, is an industry in which the labour cost bulks particularly high. Surely it is better to employ timber and cement industrialists in their own lines than in work they are not used to. If in their own lines their wages need reducing, let their own trade attend to it.