The Manawatu Herald. Saturday, May 10th., 1913. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1095, 10 May 1913, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. Saturday, May 10th., 1913. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

American press writers, commenting upon the evils disclosed by the vice enquiry at Chicago, urge that the lime has now arrived when the country must throw aside false ideas about propriety and tackle the question from the legislative standpoint. Seven States have now agreed to confer regarding the improvement of the conditions of working girls as the chief essential in reducing the white slave traffic, and more especially the necessity ot establishing a minimum wages scale. These States are Illinois, Michigan, lowa, Missouri, Kentucky, Wisconsin and Indiana. The evidence given reveals a wide difference of opinion as to whether an augmented wage scale would be quite as salutory as some investigators claim. The proprietors of big stores, wheie thousands ol girls are employed at 32s per week, reject the idea of paying 48s weekly, as recommended by the Chicago Commission,__ and obviously, they contend, the minimum wage must vary in different States in accordance with the cost of living. To establish a minimum wage in New York, it is urged, would mean that the employers would discard girls and employ men, and so tend to increase the social evil. If the big stores rejected female labour, the chief sphere of employment would be domestic seivice, and in the United States domestic service, though highly paid, is not popular with American girls.

Co-opkration is in the air nowadays. Lord Plunket recommended it to the attention of the farmers of New Zealand before he left for the Mother Country, and a meeting of agriculturists at Hawera has decided now to form a Farmers’ Co-operative Organisation Society. The United States are seeing the rise of a new school of thought which holds that cooperation is the solution of the workers’ troubles. Mr A. J. Fortenar, a Brooklyn Labour leader, says that the strike and the boycott are achieving success only at a cost to the worker out of all proportion to the advantage. Increases in wages do not alwajs mean an improved position, since the cost of the product, which the worker must buy, often grows faster than the wage of the producer, But co-operative trading would enable the unions to make their own terms at once. “When will we learn,” asks Mr Fortenar, “that the purchasing power of our wages is a level to which all our other activities are as naught ?’’