A POOR GAME

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 24 July 1919, Page 3

A POOR GAME

When I read the letter of a young; insurance clerk in our morning paper this week, and noted that the writer (two-and^ twenty years of age), was receive ing the niunificent salary of five-and-twenty shillings a week after working for two years for the Company in whose employment he is, I could not help wondering why young fellows should elect tq become clerks when they might do so much better- for themselves. 4 clerk, if he wants to make sure of hjs job (such as it is) must possess a. certain amount of ability and education, he must be content to work industriously from 8 or 9 a.m to 5 p.m., and sometimes later, and he earns in a week about as much (in many cases) as a good carpenter, bricklayer, or coal-miner earns in a day, And, unlike the carpenter, bricklayer, and miner, he has tq tjr.es'B

respectably, and keep a decent roof over his head. Of course the clerk's calling is supposed to be " genteel," and so it is— shabby-genteel, in too many cases. In nineteen cases out; of twenty, also, it leads to nothing. If a clerk presumes to complain he is generally invested, forthwith, with the order of the " sack " —there are heaps of other fellows who are only too eager to take his place, for the ranks of the clerks are fearfully overcrowded. My earnest advice to young fellows who are starting in life and who want to get on and do well for themselves is to put their pride in their pocket and learn a good, clean trade. Good tradesmen are wanted, 'are well paid, and have an excellent chance in this country of achieving independence while they are still comparatively young. Clerks are not wanted. There are far too many of them, and but comparatively few of them earn salaries worth having even though they give the best years of their lives to the work, while as for the rank and file they can never hope to rise above a pittance in the way of pay, and when they reach early middleage they are almost sure to be bundled out to make room for younger men.