CROWD OF IDLERS

Hokitika Guardian, 2 April 1932, Page 2

CROWD OF IDLERS

CITY A VAST PLAYGROUND

THE UNEMPLOYED QUESTION

SYDNEY, March 31

What strikes a visitor to Sydney—and it impresses even Sydneysiders themselves—i s the thousands of people who frequent the city, and, like the lilies of the field, neither toil nor spin. In a city like 'Sydney, there are, of course, always thousands of visitors. Just now there is also that equally obvious and tragic factor, the unemployed. There is also always an army of shoppers, mostly women. But these three .circumstances do not count for the whole of the army that idles about the city streets.

A good example of the position, and of the fact that thousands of people in Sydney who are supposed to be at work are wasting their employers’ time, was provided by the arrival recently of the nine-year-old boy Lennie Gwyther on a pony which he had ridden from Gippsland, in Victoria, in order to see the bridge opening. For three hours there awaited him in the neighbourhood of the G.P.O. in Martin place, a seething mas s of people not unlike the vast assemblage on Armistice Day. The. youngster stared with the wonderment of the legendary Alice when he came into the scene and was figuratively mobbed by the crowd. He probably wondered if Sydney worked at all, or if it was merely a vast playground. Hundreds also, who ought to have been a.t their desks, looked down for houis on the scene from neighbouring windows. And there was nothing very wonderful about the boy’s rld e , after all, for he was well cared for right through the journey, and was accompanied part of the way.

ECONOMIC WASTE. If there could be an economic calculation of the time wasted in Sydney by people who have jobs of work to do, and who saunter about the city gossiping with friends, and doing in their employers’ time the thousand and one things they are not paid to do, it would amount to a loss probably of thousands of pounds, if not million's, in the courje of years. There is more time wasted in Sydney than in any other capital city in Australia.

Among the sources of economic waste in this direction is the time occupied with attendance at funerals. Thousands of people attend these last rites, especially if .they happen to be those of persons in the commercial or financial line, for example, not so much for sentimental a s for business reasons. Evenrepresentative funeral in Sydney means practically the waste of a business day for hundreds of people. Perhaps there would be a different story, with advantage to the city’s economic life,, if time off in this and countless other directions were • deducted from pay envelopes, on the principle of the theat rical profession : “No play, no P a y-”