Siting.

Manawatu Herald, Volume III, 14 April 1891, Page 2

Siting.

The membete'of 'the present Government have., always endeavoured to pose as the poor man's friend. A short time, ago they were earnest in securing the establishment of a Sweating Commission, which resulted in nothing. They were loud, at ..the elections, about the eight hours a day work, and the Minister of Education sought to play into the hands of tlie Unionists by urging the Education Boards to boycot, the school books of Messrs Whitcombe and Tombs. Publicly and loudly have they endeavoured to pose as the champions of the poor and needy. They have even commisserated each othei'.on the paltry salaries they re ceive, and with a view to having them increased at the next session, have spent their time in dismissing many old and valued servants, so that what they had been receiving might in time be distributed amongst themselves. Surely this should have been sufficient without descending to petty meanness. However, if the Hawkes Bay Herald has not erred, there has been a more paltry " retrenchment " yet affected, but which has not been so publicly announced. The Herald says : — ln the employ of the Government at all the chief centres: of population, are a number of men engaged in copying deeds. They are not recognised as civil servants, and are not entitled to compensation for loss of office or retiring allowance, however many years they have been in the service. They get no fixed salary, but are paid by the piece, and until recently they received threepence a folio, or just half the sum usually paid by lawyers for similar work. A man in constant employment, however, could make fair wages at threepence a folio. The great drawback of the occupation is that very few men can pursue it for any length of time, and the harder they work the shorter is the period, for most of these copyists get " writers' cramp " sooner or later. At first the affection diminishes their earnings materially and in the end the work has to be thrown up altogether, for such a precarious employment threepence a folio was little enough to pay.. But a recent ukase decrees that in future only two pence a folio "shall- be paid—^onethird of the nien's.\ earning is taken away at one §jtfppso. A. ten per cent reduction pales before^sueh a wholesale knocking down of salaries, and be it seMemtlJei'etl -that' these are not highly paid officials who, if they are dismissed, incapacitated,' can cl^im retiring W lowance according 1$ t)ie scale of salary they have been receiving, but men with no official status, receiving no pay when sick or when taking a holiday, but dependent for their living upon the actual work they do. They are, to all intents and purposes, in the position of labourers on piecework. One would have thought that a Ministry which loves labourers so, denounces highly-paid officials, and bewails the lot of the poorly paid, would have seen what retrenchment could be made in all other branches of the service before cutting down copyists' wages by over thirty-three per cent.