on the demands of bank employees for an increase in
salaries which will ensure a clerk of thirty-nine drawing £950 per annum.
1. In my own bank, the tellers' cages are occupied by a young girl of twenty-three and a man of forty doing precisely the same work. The manager assures me that the girl is equally as efficient as the man and the latter has been doing the same job for the last sixteen years and will not receive further promotion.
2. My auditors tell mc that my own cashier is well paid for his post at £600 per annum and he regards himself as fortunate in being able to draw a pension of one-third of his salary at the age of sixty-five.
3. A friend of mine was retired from one of the Exchange Banks at the age of thirty- five, due to his regrettable tendency to drink until he had an attack of thr DTs. He was retired after thirteen years' service with a pension much in excess of the captains in the coastal shipping companies; his pension has been increased by 50 per cent. over the last ten years, but captains have had an increase of only 15 per cent.
4. Civil Service, local government officials, bank and insurance employees are the only persons whose salaries are increased as a matter of age and not as a matter of ability. Their pension rights are far in excess of any private company as are their holidays. It has always occurred to me as odd that promotion to commander in the Royal Navy, or chief officer in ths Merchant Navy, should be by selection, but safety-first professions are on the happy basis of yearly increases so long as they keep reasonably sober.
5. I had a business visit from one of the captains of one of our large liners recently and he was astonished at the demands of the bankers. His own chief officer is forty-two and has nothing like a salary of £950 per annum. The earliest at which an executive officer can sit for his master's examination is twenty-three although he will be lucky if he passes it by the time he is twenty-five; his responsibilities are enormous and no one who has travelled will, 1 suggest, say that bank or insurance clerks or those of the Civil Service who do not reach the rank of assistant secretary have anything like the same responsibility.
6. One can sympathise with the bank clerks when they read in the national press ot dockers averaging over £10 a week and, in some instances, averaging pay in excess of the captains of the 'Queens.' But I suggest that they are by no means badly paid at the moment when pensions and holidays are taken into consideration.—Yours faithfully,
EMPLOYER
Previous page
