WEAVERS IN POVERTY

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 904, 22 February 1930, Page 9

WEAVERS IN POVERTY

LANCASHIRE INDUSTRY’S DARK HOUR UNDREAMED OF SUFFERING LONDON, Friday. Lancashire is now facing the darkest hour in her industrial history. Week by week unemployment is growing apace. Roughly, 250,000 Lancashire cotton operatives are out of work. The weaving section is in a worse state of poverty than ever before, with sufferings undreamed of in the heyday of its prosperity. Hundreds of homes are within a hair’s breadth of ruin, and the people are living from hand to mouth, although naturally amid the despondency and gloom there is a lingering hope that the reorganisation of the whole trade will restore better times. The women are the heaviest sufferers. They find themselves discharged by the trade ip which they work with a real pride. A weaver’s average weekly wage for months past has been less than 30s. In order io make a decent living, wives have gone to work alongside their husbands. Today they have been robbed of that opportunity. Real poverty Is prevailing among thousands of middle-aged spinsters, who have worked in the mills all their lives. The extent of the unemployment is gained from the fact that in Nelson, a typical weaving town of 15,000 operatives, this week there were 4,000 people out of work, and this number is growing weekly. In addition to this very few of the mills are working anything like full time. In the last 16 years the Lancashire cotton trade has lost 3,000 million square yards of cotton cloth, of which half is concerned with India and onesixth with China. Japan has largely increased her exports to these two countries. Two or three shifts are worked in overseas countries, and wages are very much lower. A step toward reorganisation of the trade was the formation of Lancashire Cotton Corporation, Limited, with 50 companies included, comprising 5,000,000 spindles. An important combine was also made in the Egyptian spinning section of the trade.