Two Sad Cases.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVI, Issue 152, 1 July 1904, Page 4

Two Sad Cases.

The chairman of the Auckland Aid Board supplied a Herald reporter on Friday with details of two applications for charitable aid which he describes as illustrative of the sadder sides of trade unionism. In the first case a woman with four young children applied for charitaible . aid. Her story, as told to the Board, and verified by the Board's Officials, was as follows Her husband died in Newcastle, New South Wales, about 18 months agow She belonged to New Zealand, and has a brother in Auckland, a young unmarried man. After the death of her husband her brother wrote suggesting that she should return to New Zealand, and volunteering to do his best to help her with the children. He sent money to pay her passage, and she landed in Auckland some seven or eight months ago, and had lived with her In-other and widowed mother since, lluitc recently, however, her brother, who is a saddler, was told by li is employer that his services would no longer be roq)uired, as he could not earn the union rate of pay. viz., £2 5s a

week. The young man expressed his willingness to earn what he could, and was offered £2 2s a week, but the union would not grant him a permit to work for less than the £2 ss, with the result that he lost his employment, and his widowed sister applied for relief to the Charitable Aid Board. Tho Board considered the case a very hard one, and granted rations for the woman and children and rent for her house. The other case was that of a man between 60 and 70 years of age, described by Mr Garland as a very respectable man, a carpenter by trade. He. came to New Zealand' last year with a little money, and for a time got odd jobs to do, but eventually fell out of work, and had to part with his savings. Recently he was told of employment at 35s a week, but when he went to the job he was informed that he could not get the work, as he was not a member of the union. He offered to work for 30s or even 20s so long as he could get work to enable him to scrape a little money together to go back to his wife in Victoria. The builder was willing to employ him, but would not. run the risk of a fine for a breach of the award. The Board in the circumstances felt bound to give the applicant some temporary relief.

"A Freeborn Briton," in a letter to the Herald writes "The details of tho atf'ove set forth that two individuals-, presumably free citizens of a free State, which is an integral part of tihe British Empire, "were precluded from earning an honest living by the sweat of their brow through the tyrannical restrictions imposed upon them by the labour unions and tne colonial labour laws. The attempts by our Government and those of the Commonwealth States to foist upon the people a system of laws called compulsory arbitration, etc., etc., have gone -quite far enough. A little more of it may bring on a rebellion, and then the whole boiling of it would be swept away altogether, and employers would then 1k» free to manage their businesses as they pleased, and every working man would have cut equal chance of obtaining employment, unhampered by the abominable labour restrictions which hedge us in on every side. The whole system of compulsory arbitration is wrong in principle, fictitious and artificial and contrary to natural law, and the forcing it on a free people is tyranny and cruelty of the worst form. The two poor men referred to iu your paragraph desired to earn a living for the support of themselves | and their dependents, but were prevented from doing so by the trades unions. That is the bare fact, and no amount of sophism can explain it away. Preference to unionists is a monstrous wrong, and how such a thing can be tolerated in a free British colony is more then I can understand.