Unemployment

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32848, 23 February 1972, Page 16

Unemployment

Sir, —Could “Honest Jim” tell us where was this Shan-gri-la called Christchurch with “pickings” so good one need hardly work at all unless one felt like it? Despite his warning about spoilers, bashing and robbing, it sounds attractive; and, after all, a policed Utopia must provide its policemen with employment. Alas! In the Christchurch I know the unemployed not energetically hunting jobs tend to live listlessly, unexcitingly, poorly. In a resource-shrinking world most of us are living high on the environmental capital of future generations, but not

the “wicked, lazy” unemployed. With typical trueblue “honesty,” “Honest Jim” sets out to defend the system by making scapegoats of the very people who are the victims of its faulty functioning.—Yours, etc.,

B. P. LILBURN. February 22, 1972.

Sir, —My blood was on boiling point and I am near profanity on reading the letter from the Bumble who modestly signs himself “Honest Jim.” This Pharisee would regard a man who has the misfortune to be out of work as a vagrant, as they did in the “good old days.” Why the man is out of work is nobody’s business. In the eye of the self-opinionated correspondent it is only a very few cases who are genuine. The rest, he says, should be treated as vagrants and he stupidly infers that the streets will be safer with “no income” vagrants in them. It defies comprehension that such Simon Legree characters should be allowed so much rein in these advanced times, and with the E.E.C. clouds getting nearer and nearer, I wonder what the future holds with such persons around.— Yours, etc., WORKHOUSE.

February 21, 1972. Car not won in raffle Sir, —I was surprised to read this morning that a man had “bought a ticket in a raffle run by the Christchurch East Rotary Club and won a car.” I. was under the impression that it was illegal to offer a car as a prize in a raffle.—Yours, etc., CURIOUS.

February 22, 1972. [Mr K. P. Morrison, president of the Christchurch East Rotary Club, replies: “This was not a raffle, but a game of skill. Entrants had to estimate how far the car would run on a gallon of petrol.”]