INSURANCE AGAINST UNEMPLOYMENT.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 13466, 5 July 1909, Page 6

INSURANCE AGAINST UNEMPLOYMENT.

Insurance has proved such a ready solution of many difficulties and such a boon to the general community, that one naturally enquires why the problem of unemployment cannot be met in the same -way. Some e-q-teriments havo indeed been made in this direction, but it cannot be said that the

results are very encouraging. An excellent report made by the Imperial Statistical Office of Germany to the Reichstag a year or two ago, pointed out very truly that in any case insurance would offer only a relief from the consequences of unemployment without removing the cause. There are also grave practical difficulties in the way. If it is left to voluntary effort, it is found that those most likely to need it are the least ready to insure—either because they lack initiative or income sufficient to pay the premiums regularly. Compulsory insurance was tried in the Canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland, but was abandoned as a failure. The higher class of workmen —those least likely to want work—naturally

did not favour the .plan. They held it was unjust to place tho burden of insurance on classes of occupation for which the risk of unemployment either

did not exist or wns very slight. On the other hand, adjusting the premiums to correspond to actual risk is extremeJv difficult.

Obviously pergonal and moral questions enter more into the field of insurance against unemployment than in other forms of insurance. Few persons will seek sickness or accident in order to get an insurance payment. But people might be tempted either to quit work, or, at any rate, might not make any very strenuous efforts to regain it if they could get even a small unemployment payment. If the system of insurance is to be managed by Government- officials, there is sure to bo friction in its administration, especially whore it Ls attempted to enforce the rule that a man out of work must accept any employment that is offered to him. The only really practical form of insurance is that provided by certain unions who pay their unemployed meml>ers an allowance while they are out of work. The closo personal supervision which can be exercised prevents such bonefits from being abused, even if the feeling of self-respect possw-sod by mosf true unionists were not. in itself sufficient f-af-guanl. Tho demand put forth by the New Zealand Socialists that all unemployed shall be given work at full union rates of wnges—in other words, that those who work and save shall support at full rates of pay those who are not working and who, presumably, have not saved —is a far more preposterous demand, and savours of more flagrant injustice, than that embodied in any scheme of insurance, no matter how inequitably the burden in the latter case may fall.