THE SUFFERING UNIONIST. He Wants the Earth.

Free Lance, Volume IV, Issue 205, 4 June 1904, Page 6

THE SUFFERING UNIONIST. He Wants the Earth.

THE decline m the birth-rate is due to the fact that the workers of New Zealand are inadequately paid for their work. We know this because the Wellington Trades Council said so by unanimous resolution at a recent meeting. The Wellington trades unionist has high wages, and he pays a high price for the commodities necessary to him. To suit him, the wages must keep going up, and the prices of commodities must keep going down. Likewise, his enemies — the persons who want a "look-in" as well as himself — "go down," so that if he keeps getting his way there will be no one left to> give him a job in the sweet by-and-by. The conditions that make it impossible for him to afford children, i.e., the high rate of wages, have put a fictitious value on goods, not for himself alone, but for everybody else not unionists. ♦ • * • Take the very large number of commercial clerks, the thousands of working girls and women, who have to pay the same price for sustenance as the whining unionist who' gets three or four pounds, and often five pounds, a week. What of them 1 The difficulty of poorly-paid "cuff and collar" people to- make both ends meet has been brought about by the unionist, who, earning on an average half as much again as the said clerk, and double as much as the girl or woman, has less expense, and roars out that the State must guarantee his children adequate maintenance. He practically lays down this condition: "If you pay me well, and relieve me of my parental responsibility, I will consent to let nature take her course." * * * It sounds brutal, it is brutal, and is possibly the worst specimen of abject grovel to the State the "independent" workers were ever guilty of The workers themselves, who are getting the statutory wages which they deem to be insufficient, are not the class who figure on Benevolent Trustees' dole days. The poor are the people who bore the heat and burden of the day when the aristocrats of labour were in swaddling clothes. It is to be presumed that no child, not the offspring of a unionist, would be granted State maintenance, and that the bairn of a fifty-shilling clerk would not share the advantages of the child of a seventv-shillmg mechanic. * • • The unionist, after all, hasn't made the country. The men who have no unions — the farm labourers, the milkers, the country toilers — have done it. It is the city worker who yells out if a mate drives a nail after five o'clock, who grinds the backbone of the country in the dust, and who is now reaching out for the power to still further grind him, and run the country to suit himself alone. A few more years of this kind of thing, and we shall have to import servants to carry the unionist's kit and do his work while he collars the wages.