WORKING MEN’S WAGES.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1793, 22 September 1888, Page 4

WORKING MEN’S WAGES.

TO THE EDITOR. Fie, — In the acrimonious debate that annually takes place concerning the salary of the Overseer to the Geraldine Eoad Board I have accepted as honest the members’ assertion that they thought £225 a year, with free house, etc., insufficient remuneration for the man—and I would like those gentlemen to tell me by what kind of reasoning they are able to convince themselves that 5s a day, subject to broken time, is sufficient rumuneration for their other employees. An efficient overseer may be essential to making and maintaining good roads, but the pick-and-shovel man is at least as necessary. Why should we feed the one and starve the other ? Formerly food was nearly all that labor cost in the Southern States of America. Would Messrs Postlethwaite, Flatman and Co. like to see those institutions established in New Zealand ? the moral tone and intelligence of a community must be very low when men are allowed to occupy representative positions who are so unjust! This is a specimen of the way working-men are kept in bondage whilst being deluded with the belief that they are free men. Free men! Free jto starve when the productions of labor, the necessaries and luxuries of life are most abundant! And, to add insult to injury, we are preached at by hypocritical humbugs, and told that our penurious sufferings proceed from our own drunkenness and want of thrift. Think of the effrontery of a man taunting others with want of thrift whose costs of living are not a tenth of his own. And, again, we are told that workmen’s wages can only be regulated by the law of supply and demand, and villainous legislatures regulate the law of supply and demand as if it were right and proper that myriads of human beings should be robbed of the fruits of their labor and all the joys of life by thousands of the lowest order. But rascality has now reached the very brink of a terrible precipice. If it will not take warning, and come nearer a sense of justice, it must inevitably come to grief. The masses in every land are demanding a larger measure of justice—and a larger measure of justice must be conceded, whatever means may be necessary to its obtainment. We need not wade through gore to victory. We have a potent bloodless weapon in our all but universal suffrage and triennial Parliaments, if working-men would take the trouble of acquiring even a modicum of political knowledge, but they must remain serfs as long as they trust their natural enemies to represent them like trusting the lamb to the wolf, —I am, etc,

Yeeitas.