“Taranaki Central Press” MONDAY, JUNE 7, 1937. BURDENS ON INDUSTRY.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 451, 7 June 1937, Page 4

“Taranaki Central Press” MONDAY, JUNE 7, 1937. BURDENS ON INDUSTRY.

What was really in the mind of the Government in introducing a statutory forty-hour week is not clear. A great deal was said at the time about the probable stimulus of shorter hours and greater leisure in maintaining and even increasing the production of a given number of workers, and not much was said about the necessity for absorbing more men in industry.

Certainly both objectives could not be reached, as Mr O. C. Mazengarb has said to the Workers’ Educational Association in Wellington, for one is inconsistent with the other.

The question at the moment is whether either of the objectives will ultimately be reached, and what the cost will be in a national stocktaking.

It will take some time to measure the full effect of the legislation on the total output of industry, but at the moment it is agreed that the weekly output of the individual has been substantially reduced, and that more men have liad to be employed to maintain the old level of production.

The effect of rising costs is not immediately calculable, but there must be a breaking point in a country that is largely dependent on external markets for its prosperity.

Mr Mazengarb selects one phrase of the problem when he questions whether the proposed national pensions scheme should not have taken precedence of a shorter working week, and whether industry can supp ort the pension burden when it is adjusting itself to the demands of shorter hours and higher wages. The question is well timed.

National superannuation means a shorter working life, but the problem is to arrive at compulsory retiring age agreeable to the individual and not beyond the capacity of industry to support.

One great merit of the forty-hour week—-and in a similar sense of the higher school leaving age—is that it tends to lengthen the effective working span of life, but what the span ought to be has not been estimated in regard either to the health or longevity of the people of New Zealand.