The Daily News. THURSDAY, AUGUST 31, 1911. CLERKS' UNIONS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 59, 31 August 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. THURSDAY, AUGUST 31, 1911. CLERKS' UNIONS.

The finest thing trades unionism accomplishes is' to bind men together so strongly that their united strength is great enough to insist on justice between master and man. The harm it may do in many cases is to class the good worker and the poor worker alike for the purposes of pay. Neither the one nor the other has urgent need to improve his skill or his output. It may be comparatively easy to class mechanical workers or "unskilled workers" for the purposes of wage*, fcut it is clearly impossible to classify brain workers or to place a maximum wage beyond which the best of the kind can go. It is known, of course, that organisation of workers has remarkably bettered their conditions, but it cannot be proved that the initiator, the man of ideas or the person whose stock-in-trade is brains, can be bettered by hard and fast unionism, which puts a brake on his ambition. Wellington warehouse clerks (or many of them) object to be included in the scope of the Merchant Assistants' Association of Workers. One hundred (representing one thousand) merchants' clerics recently waited on the Minister of Labor protesting at the inclusion of clerks in a union initiated by warehouse storemen. This gives occasion for the sneer that the clerk considers himself a superior person to the storeman, but the real point is that no "one, whether he be tinker, tailor or otherwise, wishes to be forced into any action against his will. Fifteen clerks under the Act might form a union, and thus an awaTd might be made binding the whole. The clerks mentioned desire a statutory right not to be included in any award that may be made to the members of the Merchants' Assistants' Association of Workers. They are already struck out from membership as a result of their protest, but may be, despite this, governed by an award made without their sanction —which is a very quaint proposition. The Minister pointed out that if these protesters were cited they could go before the Court and ask for exemption from the award. He also said that a clerk need not join a union, but that anything that benefited unionists would benefit non-unionists, this reasoning seeming to mean that the misguided clerks who desired promotion or increase of pay on their merits should be compelled to fall in line with others who are content to have conditions of work and pay cut and dried and ruled into mathematical lines. It was pointed out that Australian clerks' unions classified the different grades, and each grade controlled its own affairs. This classification apparently rigidly defines the work that a given unionist is considered capable of doing, and the value is assessed just as the value of so many pounds of butter or the sawing of so many cords of wood. If the attempt to regulate human wisdom and brain work become generally successful, there will bo less initiative and some very watery wisdom displayed under the new unionism that weighs up the result of thought in the same scale as the result of manual application. It might, of course, be possible for the Arbitration Court to assess the brain value of a couple of thousand men, but it is not likely that we will have yet men who are acute enough for the job. In regard to the average clerk, it is quite likely that he is not always "on a good wicket." and that if lie is content to be weighed up and added to and subtracted by immovable machinery he would obtain temporary advantage; but the immovable machinery idea is in relation to any but the mediocre a stultifying and deadening effect on ambition. The one other effect it has is to burden the relationships between employer and employed, the chief trend of the times being to regard the worker as representing not a warm human being, but a cash value; and the employer, not a person necessarily interested in his employee, but as a machine specially designed for paying out a weighed regard for a mathematically measured job.

CURRENT TOPICB. ANOTHER RECORD BROKEN. Tom Burrows, who employs his time in the infinitely useless business of swinging pieces of timber round his head, has just broken his own world's record for twirling Indian clubs and ended up in a i state of mental aberration. Probably] bite ordinary person believes that record ' smashers of all kinds arc sane when tiicy undertako alarming and stupid feats, but there may be those who. are quite as certain that the mental capacity is not in good working order prior to the exhibitions of foolishness. If the pianoplaying fiends, club-swinging lunatics and the whole army of uncanny persons who perform weird feats of endurance can be persuaded to harness their endurance to a reproductive job, the world would be all the better for it; as it is, the world only wonders at the tremendous persistence unrestrained fools use in performing stupid tasks. Burrows, the clubswinger, is a little, inoffensive, modest man, who looks quite sensible. Sonic of tlie piano-pounders who wander the country murdering music for a great number of heurs appear to be normal, but certainly are not. The authorities step in when two men pound each other too lustily in public, but they have not yet got into the habit of preventing abnormal folk-from breaking records that arc of no earthly use to themselves or the world and injuring themselves. The people who wilfully gaze on this class of record-breaker hour after hour are necessarily temperamentally bent. No doubt when Tom Burrows retains his balance he. will again try to waste one hundred hours in doing something that is of no service when it is done.

HATS OFF! The "matinee hat" has been the butt of tke jester any time this fifty years, and the wails of the playgoers have gone up in all "civilised" countries where ladies believe people go to theatres to observe millinery. Italy, which has perhaps the largest play-going population, strenuously objected to large hats some years ago, but in one great Neapolitan theatre when the infuriated patrons sought to remove some enormous feminine hats, tho wearers put up a vigorous protest with hatpins. The hatpin was and is as dangerous as the stiletto. It is not curious that Italy should have been the first country to vigorously object to matinee hats, or it is only a comparatively recent custom for Italian ladies to wear hats at all. The Berlin authorities have stopped the hatpin hoTror and are now prohibiting the wearing of hats by ladies in the theatres. In New Zealand the playgoers' field of vision is frequently blocked by remarkable creations of the milliner's art, and as these things of beauty are available for adoration outside theatres, the average man really does not go especially to a theatro to see them again. On certain programmes one sometimes sees these gentle words: "Every lady who removes her hat confers a favor on the audience, and the management"—but ladies do not always read the programme. The hat that is at present threatening is ''all on top." It towers away into the air as if on a climbing expedition, and will just as effectively block the playgoer from seeing the hero rescue the girl as *he wonderfully beautiful creation of the "Merry Widow" type. If men got into the habit of wearing "bell-toppers" in theatres bulky policemen would be called on to deal with the situation. Tn sr>me theatres there is the trusting statement on all the walls, "Gentlemen will not smoke," but a sister placard, "Ladies who do not remove their hats are not ladies," would create a riot.

THE GREENSTONE FIND. Millions of tons of greenstone! We are assured by a West Coast wire that such a discovery has been found high up a mountain in that district and that the inevitable syndicate lias been former to exploit it. Also, that it is proposed to put it to commercial purposes in the form of mantelpieces, table tops, monuments, etc., and to open up a trado with China, where greenstone worked up into idols is regarded with peculiar veneration. In the old days, the Maori had a great weakness for greenstone, or "ponamu," the name they know it by, and it formed the object of regular expeditions to the South Island, which was, and still is, called "Te Wnhi Pounamu." The pounamu was found in small lumps in the streams ami on the coast line, and made into "meres" and other weapons and trinkets. The stone, as everyone knows, is as hard as flint, and how the Maoris, witli their primitive tools and methods, succeeded in making even an impression upon the stone is hard to understand. It is known that the shaping of a "mere" was the work of a lifetime. The reef mentioned in the wires is not the first discovered on the West Coast. We were shown about sceven or eight years ago several big lumps of greenstone that had come from a reef discovered by a Mr. Bertram near Milford Sound. This reef was worked by the gentleman in question, but the locality was difficult of access, and the procuring of labor presented another obstacle. Whether operations are still carried on there we do not know, but we do know that the quality of the pounamu was the richest up to that time discovered. The stone was cut by a Dmiedin lapidary, whilst quantities were exported to the Old Country, where it was more easily and successfully treated. If there are "millions of tons" in the new deposit and the reef we sepak of has not petred out, there should be gooil prospects ahead for this new industry, adding, as it may, considerably to the wealth of this richly endowed country.