“More will be jobless’

Press, 20 February 1979, Page 4

“More will be jobless’

PA Dunedin Conventional policies and measures to reverse the built-in growing level of unemployment were pathetically inadequate, said Mr J. P. Lewin, the former Government Statistician, at a symposium on unemployment in Dunedin.

The middle-term strategy of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development offered no real hope of solution for O.E.C.D. member states and.still less for the world as a whole.

“National alternative policies such as those recently aired in our country are equally sterile,” he said. Mr Lewin concluded that unemployment was endemic to an outdated world economic order. He said that unemployment would remain and grow. The conventional economic explanation of unemployment and the conventional prescriptions for its solution were alike largely irrelevant. The problem was basically a political one, he said.

“Fundamental changes in political direction are necessary and not just to cure unemployment. “Until these changes are made — and let it be clearly understood that we must make them democratically by consent and not by force — things will not get better, but worse. No sensible person wants to overcome unployment by force-imposed slavery,” Mr Lewin said.