The Ministry of Labour "Gazette" says:—Employment continued bad during September and showed little change as compared with the previous month. Some improvement was reported in the pig iron industry, in iron and steel manufacture, in the woollen and worsted industry, and in} the pottery trades, but there was a! further decline in employment in' the cotton industry.
The percentage unemployed; among members of trade unions; from which returns are received: was 14.6 at the end of August and! 14.8 at the end of September. The! percentage unemployed among; workpeople insured under the; Unemployment Insurance Act was, 11.9 on September 25 as compared with 19.0 at August 21. In the in-. dustries for which statistics are compiled by the Department the changes in rates of wages reported as having taken effect September resulted in an aggregate reduction of about £297,- 000 in the weekly full-time wages of nearly 1,300,000 workpeople, and an increase of about £30,000 in the weekly wages of 395,000 workpeople.
Among those workpeople who sustained reductions in wages the cipal group were men employed in the engineering industry, whose weekly rates in the principal centres of the industry were reduced by a third instalment of 5s. aking a total reduc-of 16s. €d. a week during the past three months. Other groups of workpeople affected by reductions included steel workers Shefield, men in ship-repairing yards in most of the principal dis-diets, railway carriage and waggon builders and repairers, hosiery Workers im the Midlands, letter-ress printers in country towns in and and Wales, vehicle builders, and workpeople employed in the sugar, confectionery, and fruit-preserving trade, and in cocoa and chocolate manufacture.
The w workpeople whose wages were increased in September were mostly coal miners in the Yorkshire and the East Midland area and in South Wales and Monmouthshire. Since the beginning of 1922 "the changes in rates of wages reported to. the Department have resulted" in a net reduction of over £3,900,000 in the wages of nearly 7,500,000 workpeople and a net increase of about £11,500 in the wages of} 75,000 workpeople. tion of the high cost of passages is, king. dating from 30 centuries ago, under the consideration of the, Government is very welcome. But relief should come early.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.