ENGLISH GLOVE TRADE.

Putaruru Press, Volume VIII, Issue 346, 10 July 1930, Page 3

ENGLISH GLOVE TRADE.

A GLOOMY PROSPECT. End of Safeguarding.

The Yeovil sheepskin glove-making industry, which for three years has been enjoying the greatest prosperity under safeguarding, has been thrown into consternation at the prospect of the abolition of the duties under Mr Snowden’s Budget proposals. Before the imposition of the duties the industry suffered severely from foreign competition, with consequent chronic unemployment and low wages, due to the fact that thousands of the operatives were on part time. To-day the trade enjoys 10 per cent employment, and there is no industrial unrest.

The workpeople are paid on a piecework basis, the men averaging £3 10s for a 47-hour week and the women about 31s for a 44-hour week. Some skilled hands make £5 a week. Exports have increased by 10 per cent, despite higher tariffs abroad, and manufacturers have refrained from raising the price of sheepskin gloves to the public. Into this smoothly-working piece of industrial machinery Mr Snowden has thrown his bomb. It is the considered opinion of several leading manufacturers that the withdrawal of the duties will spell disaster to Yeovil and the countryside. Mr Lionel Whitby, of Whitby Brothers, one of the oldest firms in the town says that a feeling of uneasiness and uncertainty is apparent throughout the trade at the bare prospect of the abolition of the duties.

“ Such an action, in my opinion, is certain to result in very severe periods of unemployment during the next two or three years,” Mr Whitby said. “ I should not be surprised if some of the smaller manufacturers were driven out of business altogether, and trade generally throughout the town and district will be dealt a most serious blow.”

Mr Whitby added that there had been no reduction of wages, with the exception of certain war bonuses, since the end of the war, and wages were more than double those of prewar days for a 54-hour week. In the glove trade, he said, wages were an important factor, as they represented a third of the cost of the finished article.

With the flooding of the market with cheap foreign gloves and the consequent check on home production—to say nothing of the loss of the export trade, now slowly gaining ground—the present satisfactory wage position would be dangerously affected, he added.

Figures showing the rapid rise to prosperity since the imposition of the duties were given by Mr ’. C. Clothier, a former Mayor of Yeovil and head of one of the largest sheekspin glove manufacturing concerns in the district. Whereas, from the beginning of 1921 until the end of 1925 the number of pairs made dropped as low as 309,897, that number increased between the beginning of 1928 and the end of 1929 to 617,721. It is significant that during the safeguarding period imports dropped from 655,975 pairs to 546,900 pairs, and last year, for the first time for a long period, home produciton was well ahead of the imnort trade.

“ The industry’s case for safeguarding was carefully considered by an impartial tribunal,” said Mr Clothier; “ yet these duties, in all probability, will be taken off without any kind of examination of the conditions under which the trade is carried on, or what effect such action will have on the economic position of the district. The full effect of abolition will be felt when we come to ask for spring orders next year. Our foreign competitors—France, Italy and Czecho-Slo-vakia—are only waiting their opportunity to flood the market, and the result will be that thousands of workers will be put on short time and large numbers will be thrown out of work altogether.”