WORKERS AND SLACKERS.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 319, 15 October 1915, Page 7

WORKERS AND SLACKERS.

One is struck by the different kinds of people who are doing their bit in the ammunition factories. There is our good old friend, the fat man with an income of four housand a year, and who insists on wearing blue overalls and covering himself with grease in a Government machine shop. To him the idea of work has hitherto appeared worse than horrible, every physical effort a martyrdom; yet he is everywhere seen butting in with an oil can or perspiring behind a wheelbarrow in the hope of increasing the shell output. We have also the young girt aristocrat who refuses to leave the works until she has Completed a twenty-four hour shift. One (has to confess that these high-stopping young dames are nmre enduring than cur young frie id the poor girl. They are better nurtured and face the music of the mills just as well as the men. There is the other kind, the he-male mostly, who will not give up his billiards or hisi golf for all the Germans in Europe. Off the goif course he suffers from a permanently sprained ankle. On the course (he can sprint a hundred yards in even time. He has spectacles to prove that he is blind, and medical certificates to show that his heart is in a highly dangerous condition. In one morning I have met twenty-eight sprained ankles and a gross of half-blind young men dodging a recruiting party in Hyde Park. And when one thinks of those young (girls doing their a r .l in the murky, poisonous atmosphere of the shell factories, one feels that a permanent supply of tar and feathers is badly needed on seme of our golf courses.