MORE WAGES. Equal Rates for Unequal Work.

Free Lance, Volume III, Issue 120, 18 October 1902, Page 8

MORE WAGES. Equal Rates for Unequal Work.

THAT indispensable body of men, the carpenters, who are so rapidly causing the expansion of the City of Wellington, want more wages. Working men always do, and if they can get the increase no one but the men who pay them will mind one bit. Probably the wielders of the saw and hammer, who know exactly what it cost to build the four-roomed house they are living in, and for which they pay 13s. or 14s. a week, think that the profits might be more equally divided. ♦ • • At that carpenters' meeting the other night it was said by one speaker that the employers of Wellington did not know a tradesman when they had one, that the employers admitted that many of the men (whose capabilities they knew nothing of!) were well worth 14s. or 15s. a day, and that threequarters of the total number of these ignorant persons were willing to increase the wages, recognising that as they knew nothing about anybody's capabilities, this was the correct thing to do. Which seems to indicate that the employers are really the rather stupid body that they are assumed by the speakers to be. ♦ • • But the main point in connection with the wages of the carpenters, who may be and probably are underpaid, is the question of classification. It may be that a brotherly feeling prompts them to say that any man who is successful in deluding the " boss " as to his capabilities, and who is a member of a Union, is as fully entitled to 14s or 15s a day as the "tiger" who, to borrow a vulgarism, " runs rings round him." ♦ • • It may be fair that when the Arbitration Court awards the carpenters 15s a day the employer shall pay the slowest man the same rate as the fastest. W Te can't see it, but probably the fast man is philanthropic enough to like earning the other fellow's bread for him. It is rather a curious thing that Unionists should be annoyed at a breach of award only on one side. That meeting regretted that those employers in Wellington who were willing to commit a breach of the Court award by increasing the rate did not do so. ♦ • ♦ We hold no brief for the builders of Wellington, who are sufficiently opulent to be able to afford a reasonable increase, but we do say that no man who does two-thirds of a day's work should get as much as a man who crowds a day and a-quarter's work into eighthours. Itis destructive of ambition, and the better man is invited by the system to work down to the unskilful worker's level. Perhaps, most of the carpenters of Wellington are highlyskilled men, and the whole of them are worth 15s a day. The employers, according to some employees, are unfortunately not skilled enough to judge, so that they will probably be asked to value every wielder of a chisel at the same rate. This, also unfortunately, seems to give satisfaction to the employees. Why, no one but a philanthropist can tell.