DOLE WASTE.

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LX, Issue 10830, 31 March 1932, Page 3

DOLE WASTE.

MAINTENANCE BETTER. Mrs Sidney Webb, wife of Lord Passfield, was candidly critical of the present “dole" system in her evidence before the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance, which has resumed its sittings after a long recess under the chairmanship of Judge Holman Gregory, says the London Daily Telegraph.

“If a new start, had to bo made it should not he in favour of an insurance scheme. 1 should prefer a system of maintenance. But I am not prepared to argue that point because we already have insurance,” said Mrs Webb. “I should have preferred to subsidise the trade unions, and help them to extend their unemployment insurance, while leaving them the responsibility of checking voluntary unemployment.” Mrs Webb suggested the forming of a national register of all persons within the employment field. There should also be systematic provision of maintenance for those who were without means of subsistence and were outside the scope of insurance benefit.

The main principle of the subsistence allowance, would be that the claimant must declare himself willing not only to accept any employment within his capacity, but to place his full time for normal working hours at the disposal of the Ministry of Employment. < Occupation centres would be set up and there might even be a national labour corps, in which navvies, miners, and general labourers could be enrolled and sent about in detachments equipped with tents, lorries, and tools by the R.A.S.C. to do works of coast protection, land draining, etc.

In surveying expenditure on public works, Mrs Webb said the schemes actually open to local.authorities with State aid or to the Government itself were not economically profitable, and yielded at best a slight return in public amenity. The extravagant improvement of roads, the laying out of recreation grounds, and the costly planning of seaside esplanades, “finding work” for a fpw tens of thousands of unemployed tailors and engineers, miners and shipyard workers, clerks and farm labourers, at an actual cost of £1,000,000 for each 4000 men for twelve months, were really ridiculous.

The waste involved in fabricating public works for employing the unemployed came out more clearly when we realised that there was work urgently needing to be undertaken for increasing the industrial efficiency of the nation, for which it was said capital could not be found. There was, we were told, no capital available for making the British steel industry even mechanically equal to the best already existing in the United States and Germany: none for electrifying the railways: not enough to bring to fruition the commercial production of oil from coal. Prom public works of this kind the Government was warned off, alike by the existing industrialists in the business concerned, by “the City,’’ and by the public opinion of the capitalist class. Government intervention in doing what the nation really required involving necessarily Government control and probably Government assumption of the industries in question was regarded as Socialism.