DAY BY DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 107, Issue 17977, 24 March 1930, Page 6

DAY BY DAY.

Major Herbert Evans, wno until , recently was InspectorThe Scandal General of the Ministry of the of Pensions, is a stern Inspectors, critic of the overlapping of the inspector system of the various Government and municipal departments. He writes in the Daily Herald:— “in recent years this inspectorate has been reinforced on all flanks by an army of officials attached to the executive and local authorities, men and women whose duties largely overlap in actual practice. They include factory inspectors proper with their assistants, engineering and electrical and medical inspectors, Health and Unemployment Insurance inspectors, Trade Board and sanitary' inspectors, and many, many others. All these officials visit the same factories and workshops; all may be present at the same time; several are concerned with the ■ same problem, as in the case of rates of pay and piecework records. This conflict of interest and overlapping of function naturally results in grave evasion of statutory provisions. It is reported that in 1927 only 561 of 5143 wholesale clothing factories were inspected for Trade Board purposes; 295 of the 561 had no Trade Board notices posted; 34 kept inadequate wage records; 127 kept no wage records; and 324 kept no time records. It is fair to assume that in the same year most of these places had been visited' more than once by inspectors of other departments who dealt with rates of' pay, and so on, but dare not inquire about Trade Board notices. This vast army of executive and local inspectors — totalling, it is stated, nearly 50,000, and costing, according lo the Anderson Committee, in 1923, 54 million pounds a year for executive .officers alone; fortified by numberless Acts of Parliament mainly designed lo protect the hours, earnings, and health of the workers —could render incalculable service to society in factory and mine and on the railways il centralised control w r ero substituted for control by departmental principles. \ business house organised on these lines could not escape bankruptcy in a month- Such methods perpetuate a 101 l of toil in industrial occupations arising from machinery and industrial disease, and a constant evasion of highly important enactments relating to the general welfare. Whilst competent officials arc queueing up at some places thousands of other works go uninspected. Of 272,817 factories and shops on the Home Office register on December 31, 1927, no fewer than 84,177 were unvisited that year, and of these 32,981 were premises in which machinery was largely employed. The need for coordination' of effort is obviously urgent. The compincd services of this armv of inspectors, properly 'directed through one or two channels, could not fail to render incalculable service to the industrial population, service for which it was called into being. ’