The Dockers' Pay The shilling a day increase in the
dockers' rates of pay in ports throughout the country may prove less important in the end than the attempts being made, once more, to solve the problem of decasualisation. Much of the labour in and round the docks can never be regular, for cargo boats do not run to schedule like liners, and if loading can often be arranged in advance unloading often cannot. Hence the inevitable existence of a certain reservoir of casual labour. But the evils of the system are flagrant. Dockers must necessarily live near their work, ready for a call that may come at any moment, and the dockside housing problem is usually acute, the health of the family having often to be sacrificed because the wage-earner is tethered to his job. Decasualisation, if it could be effected, would put an end to another evil, for where jobs go largely by foreman's favour means undesirable in varying degree have to be invoked to secure that favour.
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