The Company says :- " From internal evidence in his account
of a Specimen Day' it is evident that A Gas Fitter' refers to the Gas Light and Coke Company. There is scarcely a true word in his statements. The Company is proud of its relations with its employees and jealous of its reputation as a just and kind employer, and therefore asks for the publication of the following corrections of the more flagrant of the lies in the article in question. £6,000,000 represents, not the profits made from automatic meters alone,' but the income from the sale of gas through all classes of meter. There are no `profits' from by-products, enormous or otherwise, distributed to our shareholders. The entire net income 'from by-products is applied towards meeting the cost of gas manufacture and supply, and the balance of that cost and the only profit the Company distributes have to be provided out of the price of gas. That is why ' a short time ago 4d. was put on every 1,000 feet of gas ' • an increase which, as the notice to consumers stated, was rendered necessary by the serious reductions in the revenue derived from coke and other residual products '—a part of the notice which Gas Fitter' omits entirely= and by the increase in wages,' which he has the effrontery to say he ' never received.' Every gas fitter's pay was increased by fd. per hour from 1st January, 1925. The top rate of pay is £3 7s. 9d., not £3 2s. per week ; the minimum is £2 15s. 10d., not £2 10s. per week. The top rate is given as soon as the man is qualified, sometimes at once, not after about 20 years.' Those are but a few of Gas Fitter's ' sins of commission. Those of omissions are as flagrant. He does not say that all employees are co-partners now owning between them £500,000 of Stock, received in addition to their wages • that ho gets a week's holiday every year not only with pay but with a substantial addition to his wages for the week ; that work is so arranged that there is no unemployment for the gas fitters ; that the Company subscribes liberally to a fund for supplementing Health Insurance pay and a War Distress Fund for special cases of hardship ; in short, he omits all that would account for the splendid relations between the Company and their men, after packing as many lies into his statements as they could hold." * * *
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