IS IT PARADISE?

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 21, 16 April 1927, Page 24 (Supplement)

IS IT PARADISE?

CONDITIONS IN AMERICA NO BETTER THAN BRITAIN Take up any issue of the American Federation of Labour’s Weekly News Service, and one will find item after item showing that “God’s own country,” the land of high wages, short hours, ahd industrial peace, is just like this country, says a British exchange. Poverty and unrest, inefficiency and long hours, ill-fed children, and capitalist ca’ canny—they all flourish. Here are some statements taken from the issue of February 5: “The average full-time hours per week for males in foundries of the United States of America, as a whole, was 51.5 in 1925”: “between 250,000 and 300,000 school children in New York City are suffering from malnutrition, according to Health Commissioner Harris”; “the Department of Agriculture joins with bankers and business men in advising cotton-growers to slow down, to produce less”; “the fatality rate of American mines, said a. representative of the United Mine Workers, was three to four times as high as that in European mines”; “the Federal Government has thousands of workers on a seven-day basis, said the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees.” And so we could continue, but we have given enough to show that America is ftot all it is painted, by some, to he. The truth is that the existence of high money wages in certain industries is being used by interested propagandists over here to make America appear a sort of paradise for workers. It is indeed about as far from Paradise as are the Paradise Alleys of Britain’s slums.