The daily morning oasis., 1919-12-06
BRITISH LABOR STIRRED
OVER FOOD COST
By Floyd MacGriff

Dy IIOyu
LONDON, Dec. 5.-The entire la
Dor union movement of Great Brit
ain is deeply agitated over the high
-tcost of living, because successive in
creases in wages have brought them
no real relief. Feeling is general that
something can be and should be done
by the government to bring down
high prices. Trade union leaders point
out that the government is the chief
weapon to cut high phices. The prof
iteering act has not resulted in re-
ducing the cost of living; instead it
has gone up. In the past month it
has gone up s per cent.
Frank Hodges, secretary of the
Miners Federation, is at the fore
front of the union mems movement to
get some plan working which will as
sure all working people some meas
ure~of relief. His plan is that excess
profits taxes, now used to reduce the
national debt, should be diverted and
used in making the cost Of things less
Hodges maintains that operation of
excess profits had not forced down
prices; instead, it had kept them up.
Gas these profits are made out of
industry" says Hodges, "and out of
unwarrantable increase in prices to
the community, those profits should
be taken universally from all people
who made them and utilized in the
direction of bringing down prices"
The whole matter will be gone into
thoroughly at the special session of
the Trades-Uni Congress-. The la
bor movement itself will endeavor to
find solution of the high prices
problem and the solution found will
be pressed upon the government.
Northcliffe's Evening News has
this to say of Britain's "New poor,
the silent sufferers"
lin Russia the Bolshevists have en-
deavored to rid themselves Of the
middle class by means of wholesale
murder. 1t almost looks as if we
were going to achieve the same end in
this country by means of high prices
and high taxation.
There are two classes of the new
poor in special who are suffering Sc
verely-far more severely than most
of us know. There are those who live
on pensions or on the interest of their
savings, and who find their income
tax put up to six shillings in the
pound ($1.26 out of every $4.2O in
GOMEZ, local taxes trebling, and what
is left to them is worth less than
half it was in 1914. That makes all
the difference between tolerable COM
fort and intolerable penury.
'The second class consists of pro
fessional people with earned incomes
These have not been able to double
their charges like manual workers
and, in consequence, their incomes are
virtually halved.
"The new poor constitute quite
large class. Their wives are often
their own servants and they work as
hard as any factory worker. These
people do not squeal. They suffer fol
the most part in silence"
Thus with the new poor and the
manual working classes, along will
the old poor of which England GER
tainly had a plenty, there is popu-
lar backing to any campaign designed
to cut the cost of living.
But government figures show that
the prices of most things are still
climbing.
Food scarcity has eliminated Sat
urday night cheap markets for work
ingmen's families; furniture and
clothes have advanced from 200 to
300 per cent over 1914 prices; rents
are up and housing accommodations
less; the intended abolition of the
bread subsidy will soon add $25O.0OO,-
900 annually to the workpeople's food
budget. When prices of other foods
advanced the poor increased by &C
per cent their consumption of bread
The Daily News, after a thorough
investigation which showed that pre-
vious estimates of family budgets
were very faulty, pleads for an ex-
haustive inquiry by the government
into the cost of living today, in order
to furnish "more satisfactory data as
to the cost on which to base official
calculations" which are invariably
used in negotiating wage disputes.