WELLINGTON TOPICS

Taranaki Daily News, 18 March 1920, Page 5

WELLINGTON TOPICS

RALLWAYMEN'S PAY. REPLY TO MR, MASSEY. (From Our Special Correspondent.) Wellington, Marci 15. Replying to the Prime Minister's statement in regard to rnilvraymen's pay. Mr. Mack, the secretary of the Society of Railway Servants, contends that it should have been placed ho'oi'P the Wages Inquiry Board when that body was sitting, and not reserved till alter the presentation of Mr- Justice Stringer's report which disppsed of the men's ease without giving them an opportunity to appeal. Waiving this point for the time being, Mr. Mack maintains that if the increase in the men's wages were made on the basis' r>f the increase in the cost of living, ihn pay of the first-class guard, taken as ait example, instead of being raised from ■ C) fid a week, the pre-war rate, to £4 7-. it should be raised to £5 3s (id lie icrives at this conclusion by the asi'linrvtion that the purchasing power, of the sovereign to-day, in comparison with pre-war times is not more than IDs, which, of course, is substantially below the calculations of the statisticians, and wishes the Prime Minister/to understand that if the men cannot obtain what t.uey want by peaceful negotiation tljey may be driven to take some other action., HOMELESS WELLIXGTOX. Before the war it was impossible to make the avemge Wellington citizen believe he had ''slums" at his very door almost as bad as any of those in the big provincial cities at Home, and even in these days, when he admits there Is a. great scarcity of homes, he is not eager to recognise the sordid facts, lint Mr. Peter Eraser, the member for Wellington Central, has been laboring for a year or move past to attract further i.ttention to the scandal of Wellington's slums, and has at last induced the Evening Post to let a little light into the situntion. The representative of the paper was first taken to see some of the "better class" houses. "Their tim'bers are so rotten," he reported in .Saturday's night's issue, "that one. could almost put a. linger through them; their iron roofs have rusted away so that any shower comes through them like water through a sieve. Their rooms are pokey and dark, with windows often out of working order, so that they arc either up or down permanently; the outhouses are usually in worse condition still, bi-ing hardh anv protection against the weather.' These are the better homes of the bad daft?." THE WORSE. The description of the "worse" houses confirms everything that has been written on the subject, in this column . from time to time. "In the three rooms of one house," the reporter writes, -"there were fifteen people—a widow and six orphan children in one, and a man and wife and six children in the other two. In nine houses in one property, owned by a public body, were fifty-nine men, women and children, including eight returned soldiers. The worst example of all seen in two hours' tour was where a widow and six children were living in a condemned house with glass out of the windows and the Toof so leaky that tits ceiling paper hung down in curtains across the upper rooms. Every time it blew-, one or more of the remaining panes of glass went, and in the house dose by where the iron already had been removed from the side wall by a hoiweknacker lay a woman with a broken leg." And this in the capital city of the Dominion, which prides itself upon the enterprise of its municipal government!