The Wairoa Bell, AND Hobson County Gazette. FRIDAY, JUNE 2nd.

Wairoa Bell, Volume V, Issue 200, 2 June 1893, Page 5

The Wairoa Bell, AND Hobson County Gazette. FRIDAY, JUNE 2nd.

An Auckland paper recently said that in New Zealand the advisability of legislative compulsion in the direction of limiting the working day of wage-earners to eight hours is not so burning a question as it is in the Old Country. And proceeded to say that such was not to be explained by an extra fondness for long hours amongst colonial workmen, but rather because in their country eight hours of labour had come to be generally accepted by employers as a legitimate day’s work. This may be the case with the Colony as a whole, especially amongst those who themselves have to labour. We believe that there are but few individuals who when employing another expect more than eight hours as a day’s work, but it is in the case of companies and large concerns where a longer clay is looked lor. The eight hours question has always been a sore one amongst the sawmillers of the North who never conld understand why millhadns in Taranaki and other Southern provinces should only be worked eight hours whilst they have to work nine, ten. and even more hours per day. The Eight Hours’ Rill which the Minister for Education intends to introduce next session will provide for the creation of an eight hours’ working day in various trades. For the purpose of the Act the colony will be divided into districts, co-terminus with the present education districts, and various factory inspectors will be appointed registrars in these districts, whose business it will be to enroll members of each trade on separate rolls. On receiving a petition from, say fifty workers in any trade, the registrar must hold a poll to bring the Act into force, and should such a poll be favourable eight hours will lie declared a legal day for that particular t rade in that particular district, and any employer dismissing a member of his trade for refusing to work more than the eight hours which employees have decided by poll to be a legal day, will be considered guilty of a misdemeanour, and be liable to punishment accordingly. Under the system proposed, it would be

possible for carpenters to work only eight hours in Wellington district, and ' ten in adjoining districts where they had not brought the Act into force, and for painters to be working eight hours only, while plumbers might have to work nine or ten hours in the same district. The details may yet be altered materially, but tins is how they at present stand.