CLASSIFICATION OF UNEMPLOYED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 201, 26 August 1933, Page 8

CLASSIFICATION OF UNEMPLOYED.

(To the Editor.)

Many of your reddens will applaud the letter on the failure of the , authorities to classify unemployed. Some of the criticisms | passed on the unemployed as a body are cruel in the extreme. The man of forty odd or more who has never done manual work in his life is suddenly thrown on to the hard world and required to use pick and shovel. Is it reasonable to expect that he will do even half as much as a man who has been at this sort Of work all his life? A few years ago when on holiday I helped a man to excavate for a tennis court. An hour at a time of shovelling and wheelbarrow pushing was enough. Had I been paid at the rate subsequently offered to the unemployed for navvying. I doubt if I should have earned- a shilling a day. Yet some of us expect that men with muscles not hardened to this kind of work shall make enough, to keep themselves and their families. Nothing angers me more than the comments of some well-fed, well-to-do men oil the "loafing" of the unemployed. I wonder what they would feel like if they had to shovel wet clay for a living. The real tragedy of relief work is not with the young, but with the middle-aged. Bettej; classification and an extension of the sustenance system are needed. FIFTY-ODD.