I move amendment No. 9:—
In sub-section (3), line 44, after the word "authority" to add the words "but shall not include any engineer in the employment of such local authority."
This is to exempt any engineer in the employment of a local authority, and I base the appeal for engineers very much on the same grounds as those on which I based the appeal in relation to veterinary surgeons. First of all, there is the general argument that people who have had to go through a certain course and spend certain moneys in order to get professional qualifications ought to be protected from any sort of casual interference with the emoluments that were given to them and secured to them in such a way that people entering this service under local authorities had a certain type of life standardised for them. I think that, particularly, we should avoid interfering with these in a sort of incidental way; we should avoid making any attack on these salaries and the standard of living which attaches to the salaries, unless there is some argument going to be used that, in fact, these people are being paid too much for the work they do.
The medical men, I think, had their case based very definitely on grounds of hardship and humanitarian grounds, to a certain extent. So far as the veterinary surgeons are concerned, I based my plea on the fact that this old-time and rather distinguished profession had almost got into decay and was in the lowest position it ever reached in the country, and that the period we were passing through, as I hoped, at any rate, was transitory and that we should retain these people and show that we had some regard for them until things bettered. Also, there was the point that there was no financial sacrifice imposed on a local authority to any extent in agreeing to exempt veterinary surgeons. So far as the engineers are concerned, I simply want to add this, that of all the various types of professional people I have had experience of from time to time, the engineers have caused me most wonder, in this respect, that when I view the salaries they earn, or, at least, the salaries that are held out to them, and compare them with the very arduous and very difficult course which they have got to follow, the engineering profession I found to be on the whole much the worst paid of all the professional people. There are undoubtedly much fewer plums in the way of very big posts falling to engineers than to any other group of men I know.
It has been notorious that, up to about five or six years ago, most of the engineers who got their professional qualifications here emigrated. We had then a burst of engineering activity in the country which meant that we not merely catered for those coming out of the universities and the technical schools at the time, but that we had to get some of them brought back from abroad. That phase of development, although still occupying a big number of engineers in the country, has almost stopped as a means of bringing new engineering graduates into professional work and we are, therefore, back again. There will be, of course, a certain wastage there, particularly in later years, and there will then be an annual recruitment to it, and in that way there will be provision made for occupation for engineers, but, at the moment, the avenues are blocked and the vacancies have been filled. There are very few new posts being created these days. The engineer is back again to the work on which he had mainly to rely in the old days, that is to say, either drainage work, somewhat attached to Government, or work under the auspices of a local authority.
I do not know how many engineers attached to local authorities will suffer under this Bill. I do not know, in other words, what salaries come above the limit of the salaries which are attacked in this Bill, but whatever the number may be, I know that it is going to be small and, again, I can urge that there will be very little financial sacrifice imposed on a local authority. I think that in the case of these men, who have spent a considerable amount of time and have had to go through an expensive course and have moral debts due to their parents and are engaged in paying something back for the education they have got, we should not rashly and incidentally interfere with their salaries fixed in other times, on receipt of which they decided on a particular standard of living for themselves and we should particularly not do that when there has been no argument made that they are overpaid, that the work which they do is not sufficiently important and not sufficiently well performed as to warrant the receipt by them of the particular sums of money that accrue to them. I should like to have this amendment sympathetically considered.
