Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/51

 Rh at home. I have already mentioned the great redundancy of labour in 1859, due to the decline in the production of the gold-fields, and an eight hours day could obviously do nothing to check that. Then Victoria has its own measure—one sometimes thinks a double measure—of the unsettled class, the 'sundowners,' 'swagmen,' remittance men, ne'er-do-weels, who will work now for a season at sheepshearing or again for a season at the diggings, but are found most of the time wandering about the country from station to station looking for work, and generally preferring not to obtain it. An eight hours day is no remedy for this complaint. Then even in the ordinary occupations there seems to be in some ways more unsteadiness of employment in Victoria than at home, more changing of masters, and more time lost consequently between job and job. That was remarked upon by several of the witnesses before the Shops Commission. Mr. John Reynolds, for example, a working engineer, who emigrated to Victoria in 1870, said, 'There is a great difference in steadiness of employment here and at home. At home you may serve your time in a shop, and be in it till you are an old man. There is one case, perhaps, out of every hundred where that is the case.' That, he said, never occurred in Victoria, and he thought this irregularity of employment in the colony was so considerable that it kept wages down. The same circumstance is noted in a report issued by the Operatives' Board of Trade of Melbourne on the 15th of April, 1859, which complained that though wages in Victoria were nominally high, they were barely sufficient to maintain a man in the position held by his fellow-workmen in Great Britain, 'through the time he loses from one job to another looking for employment.' This peculiarity also is one which an eight hours day has no charm against. Nor has it any charm against those great depressions which the whole world feels in common. The Australian Ironmonger for 1887 (p. 47) quotes a report of the Boilermakers' Society of England, stating that out of a total of 28,000 members, it had on an average 8,000 unemployed for the previous three years, and then mentions that there were then fifty boilermakers unemployed in Melbourne out of a total of 230. The proportion is smaller, but it is more striking when we reflect how much of the Australian work must be repairs, and it shows plainly enough that the great trade depressions make little difference between an eight-hour country and a ten-hour one. From these or other causes there is, as the American consul reports in 1884, almost every year an outcry about the unemployed in Melbourne in the dull season, notwithstanding that immigration