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Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 481, 18 June 1890, Page 4

Javanese coolies are being imported bo the Queensland sugar plantations. Recently the “Melbourne Age'’ has been supplying its readers with full particulars in regard to the prevalence of sweating in the Melbourne clothing trade. The facts unearthed by the committee of investigation appointed by the Tailors’ Union are of the most sensational character. We find that the Gorman steamers are regularly boarded on behalf of the master sweaters, so that the ignorant German, Jewish and Polish imigrants may be at once pressed, into the service. We read of loathsome, fever - stricken dens in which men and women are working together under conditions antagonistic alike to health and to morality. We learn that these wretched woikers are paid such wages as lOd for making a pair of tweed trousers, 4d for sewing a dozen button holes, for “finishing ” a pair of moleskin trousers, and 7d for turning out a boy’s jacket. However, the most startling revelation of all is that these starvation rates are really imposed, not merely by the wholesale clothing’ factories, but also by fashionable Collins-street firms whose scale of payment to the master sweaters themselves may be illustrated by the figures—3s for the making of an overcoat, 2s for a sac coat, and lid for a suit of boy’s clothing! When we are further told that on these terms some of the master sweaters contrive to make weekly profits of £lO, £l2, or £ls, we may have an idea of the system of white slavery existing in Melbourne. Thenewsmustcomeasan unpleasant surprise to prominent citizens, prosperous merchants, doctors, clergymen, and others, that these are the conditions under which the clothes they order—and, by the way, pay handsomely for—in Collinsstreet are manufactured.