The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORORATED The Evening News, Morning Nwes and The Echo. MONDAY, MARCH 16, 1908. THE UNEMPLOYED BILL.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 65, 16 March 1908, Page 4

The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORORATED The Evening News, Morning Nwes and The Echo.

MONDAY, MARCH 16, 1908. THE UNEMPLOYED BILL.

Tor the cause that lades oMfetonco, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance. And the good that »s em 40.

The defeat of the Labour Party's Unemployed Bill in the House of Commons has been unexpectedly decisive. For the last three or four years the demand for some State provision for the employment or support of the vvorkless has been growing more and more urgent, and the Liberal leaders have definitely pledged themselves to do something practical in this direction. In 1905 an Unemployed [Workmen's Act authorised the Local Government Board to establish in London and in all municipal boroughs and urban districts of not less than 50,000 inhabitants, a Distress Committee to receive applications for work from the unemployed, and to arrange for its distribution. The Distress Committees and the central body of management in each district were to administer a fund raised partly by voluntary contributions, partly by municipal subsidies to the maximum limit of a halfpenny rate. The Act instructs the committees to assist the workless to

emigrate, to establish farm colonies, or to buy areas of lantl so as to give occupation to the unemployed. This looks a sufficiently comprehensive scheme, but it did not prove very efficacious, and last year Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald proposed the supplementary measure that has just been introduced to Parliament by Mr. Havelock Wilson, and has been unceremoniously cast out. IXr. Wilson's Bill embodied substantially all the chief features of the Bill brought in by Mr. Mac Donald last session. It demanded that all County and Borough Councils and urßan districts shall assume the duties of Local Unemployed authorities, and shall register their own unemployed. Where a workman has so registered himself, the B'll declared that "it shall be the duty of the Local Unemployed authority to provide work for him, or failing work to provide maintenance for him and those dependent upon him while he is unemployed." The Central Unemployment Committee were to consist of representatives of the trades unions, and the Boards of Agriculture, Trade, Education, and Locai Government, and their chief duty was to frame general schemes for the provision of work for the workless. Every Local Unemployment authority was to appoint a sub-committee, which should draw up local Echemes for the employment of its own applicants for work; and while refusals to work on the one hand release the Local authority from all responsibility, a section of the Bill provided that in case of "deliberate and habitual disinclination to work" an order of the Court might be applied for to enable the Local authority to "enforce control" of the recalcitrant worker.

Assisted emigration was one general remedy proposed; but, generally speaking, it -was left to the Local Government Board to consider all schemes of relief, and to decide who should p--y for them. Whenever the unemployed exceeded 4 per cent of the employees reported on, or wherever "exceptional distress" appeared, the Local Government Board -was empowered to supplement the efforts of the Local authorities by devising ''schemes of national utility" for the employment of the workless.

The salient feature of the BUI, in fact, its fundamental principle, was the assumption that it is the duty of the State, through the local governing bodies, to find work for the unemployed. This was the point round which the chief opposition to the measure centred, and Mr. Asquith. probably represented the views of the great majority of his hearers when, he insisted that the adoption of this principle would ultimately do far more to injure than to benefit the workers as a whole. A leading Radical member, 3Jr. Maddison, declared with much force that the competition of these pauperised unemployed would throw legitimate labour out of work, and would disorganise the unions. But the chief spokesman of the opposition to the Bill on the Liberal side "was ilr. John Burns, who spoke with double, authority as an experienced Labour leader, and as President of the Local Government Board, which, if the Bill had been passed, would have been charged with the responsibility of carrying it into effect, ilr. Burns dwelt with strong emphasis on the waste of public money over schemes for the employment of the \ workless that could not be expected to pay their way. He defended the Liberal Government against the baseless charge of neglecting the unemployed, but he contended that temporary expedients of this sort which would encourage the workers to look to the State not only for employment but for support, are injurious to the best interests of the masses. Last year —speaking on the same subject iij the House of Commons—Mr. Burns pointed out that the Liberal Government was following consistently a policy of " organic change" in the industrial and social system, and that by attempting to colonise the rural districts, to house the poor to provide allotments and small holdings for the landless, and to check the abuse of the liquor traffic, lie and his colleagues were doing the best that could be done in the permanent interests of the nnemplayed. With, the Socialists and the independent Labour garty, in their gre-

sent aggressive state of miad, this boia and honest criticism of popular nostrums is not likely to find universal favour; but we believe that the majority of intelligent men and women at home, "not wedded to palliatives nor enamoured of pauperising relief works," will readily respond to Mr. John Burns' appeal and admit that Government has done well by substituting '• organic changes " for spe> cious but futile remedies, " transient in their effects and demoralising in their consequences."