WELLINGTON TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 May 1917, Page 8

WELLINGTON TOPICS.

j . i XATIOXAL EFFICIENCY. SLOW PKOGRESS. \ \ (Special Correspondent.) Wellington, May 7. Few of the good things expeeteil fronfthe Xational Efficiency Board when it was set up with an impressive flourish of Ministerial trumpets have yet been realised. ■ Xo doubt the members of the Board and of the district' committees have done a lot of arduous and useful ■work, and with the personnel of these bodies no fault is being found. But after some months of enquiry and investigation, confidential reporting and recommending, the Board appears to have reached a point at which it can proceed no further without the intervention of the Government, and the Government seems to be too busy or too timid ' or too indifferent to take the steps necesary to give effect to its proposals. That is the position as it presents itpelf to the public to-day. AT THE BEGINNING. . Hew little real progress has been made with the business wihich it.wi'.s hoped the Board would hasten along 111:1/ bo .judged from an article, a sort of compromise between an interview and a commentary, which appeared in one of the local newspapers on Saturday. The author says that "when the war is over" Mr. W. Ferguson, the chairman of the Board, will 'be able to give "much information" concerning the "well-nigh nnsolvable problems" arising out of the present abnormal conditions. When the war is over! If the country has to wait till the conclusion of the war for any benefit from the labors of Mr. Ferguson and his colleagues it will have a very real grievance indeed against the responsible people, and these will not be the members of the 'Board.

/ MEANWHILE. ■ K In tlia meantime it is not difficult to obtain some idea of Mr. Ferguson's personal views upon the means of achieving national efficiency from tlie indications supplied by the local newspaper. The.chairman of the Board is represented as saying that there are maify places in shops now .occupied by men which girls could fill,'bub the 'employers hesitate, "as the wages in' most cases by award must necesasrily be .the same as those given to men." Presumably these are cases in winch women could give as good services as are now 'being rendered by men and in which the principle of equal pay for equal work might be fairly applied, but according to Mr. Ferguson, "employers are conservative in their ideas as to the payment of women.'' THE FARMERS' TROUBLE. If the war goes on for another year and members of the Second Division are called up, the question of women labor in the towns will solve itself. The Appeal Board may be trusted to exempt no fit men of military age whose place could be at all adequately filled by a woman. But in the country the problem 'will nob be so easily solved. Women are not physically adapted for ploughing or ditching or 'bush-felling. But women here would do at least what sisters in the Mother Country are (!oing, as many of them have proved, and if the Government would begin the work of serious organisation now, more than half the fear of a labor famine in v tlie rural districts would be dispelled.