"LIVING ON THE DOLE."

Cromwell Argus, Volume LXI, Issue 3161, 4 May 1931, Page 3

"LIVING ON THE DOLE."

TIRED OF THAT LABEL.

(BY SIR JAMES SEXTON, M.P.)

Since the end of the war, something like eight hundred millions has been paid in town and country to men and women who can't find work to do, and consequently have no wages to take home to keep the wolf of want from the door.

This is a fact and a figure to startle anybody, and perhaps it is not surprising that it has caused such questions to be asked every day, everywhere, as, "Can't this drain on the country's financial resources be stopped?" "Is this 'dole' to go on indefinitely?" and—in an everdescending scale of criticism: "When are we going to wake up to the fact that we are being shamelessly exploited by a lot of lazy folk who like living on the dole a jolly lot better than working for an honest wage?" Legal and Honourable Right. Well, I don't object to people being startled. I'm startled myself. Here and there abuses may arise; such a contingency is possible in such a complicated scheme. What I do object to is ignorance, stupidity, and greed posing as patriotism, foresight, and economy. I will deal later with those people who, in the smug complacency of an assured income, love nothing better than to libel and traduce and humiliate hundreds of thousands of their fellow-countrymen. At the moment I will deal with the saner questions. The drain on our national resources can only be slopped when the deep i wound of compulsory unemployments is stanched and healed. Meanwhile what is called the "dole" is the bandage as well as the ointment by which the wound is kept healthy and immune from evil outside infections. Thus it follows that the "dole" is to go on indefinitely, in the sense that it is to last as long as it is needed. In other words, it is to go on just as long as the system of Unemployment Insurance Benefit is part and parcel of the law of the land, and as long as there is a single person who is legally, rightfully, and honourably entitled to draw that benefit. Armchair Critics and Idle Wastrels. I can imagine the hullabaloo which would be raised if the very men who talk in train and street, in cosy armchairs at the clubs, about "the country being bled white to keep a lot of wastrels idle," were to hear that the insurance company whose policy they hold had suddenly made up its mind that the execution of its contracts was a drain on its resources, and that henceforth it would receive but not pay, that anybody who was silly enough to die at such an awkward time as the present must take the re- , sponsibility. i No! that's not an outrageous illustration of the utter injustice of much | of the criticism —so called—of this national system of insurance against compulsory unemployment. It is simply on all-fours with the facts. I I do not mind the word "dole" as a convenient label, so long as the label is not used as a libel. My dictionary gives two alternative meanings of this much-used and much-abused word: (1) A share distributed. (2) Something given in charity. If the word is used in the first sense I have no objection to raise. If it is used in the second I denounce it as a heartless libel, founded on ignorance and prejudice. No working man, whose weekly wage is regularly docked for the benefit of his idle brothers, joins in this gibe. If it were necessary, he would make his contribution greater without grumbling. I consider that the uncomplaining loyalty, the spirit of helpful comradeship, which pervades all classes of labour, m respect of this insurance contribution for the common good, is worthy of all praise and of the sincere respect Of every good citizen. I have indicated already that we want a new spirit in the nation with regard to this matter. Perhaps I ought rather to say that we want the spirit which permeates the working classes to extend to all classes. The Real Parasites. Criticism of our system has not been confined to our own country and people. America, for instance, has rather plumed herself on being free from anything resembling our dole system. It is to be hoped that she will have no occasion to envy us so valuable a possession before she is through her own unemployment trouble. But, at any rate, the visible consequences of her lack of any real machinery other than charity for tackling a vast wave of trade-depres-sion and worklessness, and the social dangers that state envisages, have had the effect of opening the eyes o± some of our own short-sighted economists to the fact that it is possible to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. The contention that the system needs overhauling, that abuses of it ought to be severely dealt with, l have no quarrel with, so long as it is frankly and cordially admitted that the person who is unavoidably workless is as honestly entitled to draw his weekly insurance money as the business man, who has had the foresight to insure against disablement, feels himself justified m accepting the payment due on his policy during W needed something more than mere acceptance of the fact that j the worker who is temporarily and compulsorily out of a job has a legal right to draw his "dole." There is something about the word "dole" that suggests a pittance, an amount just sufficient, and no more, to keep body and soul together. Thus when we nut a bit of human sympathy into oui thinking, we find that that is all it is-just enough to keep a workingclass man and his dependents from toppling over into the pit of hopelessness from which the only escape seems to be to lay violent hands on a social system which seems to be re-

sponsible for the strange phenomenon of a man being unable to live in a world in which there seems to be enough for everybody. But x. must not let that thought divert me from the main theme. - It would lead too far; though it might lead to the kind of a panacea which would make even the dole an anachronism. Nevertheless, if the more leisured, or better circumstanced classes are going to sneer at, and criticise adversely what they scornfully dub the dole, I would point them to the real parasites; such, for instance, ..as the drawers of mining royalties, who are, par excellence, the true drawers of doles.

The mine-owner risks his capital; the miner risks his life; but the royalty owner risks nothing at all. He takes his plunder whether the mine's a success or not. He sits tight, does nothing, draws his "dole," and thereby taxes you v and me every time we put on a shovel of coal to warm our rooms. It Makes Me Sick. There are others—those who are professionally unemployed, the men who "toil not neither do they spin," but who live in great comfort upon the interest on funds which the labour of countless hands, the sweat of countless brows has earned, and out of which these same hands and brows have retained little more than the soil and the sweat. It makes me sick to hear people who have lived in idle luxury all their lives talking of "people who are content to live on the dole, and are not likely to get work as long as we are willing or obliged to keep them in idleness." I repeat, we want a new national spirit of sympathy and brotherly understanding; a spirit which sees behind the colossal human and financial figures of unemployment the millions of workers who are ready and willing to help the workers eating out their hearts in enforced inaction, and who are bitterly resentful of those who, more fortunate though not more worthy, regard them as parasites. We need to regard them rather as independent-minded fellow-citizens, who are labouring under a temporary and painful disability, which might be, in one form or another, the unhappy lot of anyone, and to which no more disgrace attaches than to the receipt of a weekly wage or a monthly i salary.