ABUSING THE DOLE

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 190, 9 May 1931, Page 12

ABUSING THE DOLE

Half a Million Offenders REVELATION IN BRITAIN To-day there are at least 500,000 people drawing unemployment insurance benefit for whom originally it was not intended, writes a special correspondent of the “Daily Mail.” This amazing figure emerges from a consideration of official statistics. These ,are not individual cases of fraud; they are mainly those of men and women who have taken advantage of the state of the law to draw money from the taxpayers either as an addition to wages or as an unmerited gift long after they have finally left occupations in which they were originally employed and insured. Under this one head alone there are 315,000 people drawing the dole who formerly would not have received it and who, while they may have a legal right, have certainly no moral right to it. They are those who have left industry for good, who have. passed out of the Wage-earning class, or, in the case of women, have left work to get married and yet succeed in establishing claims to unemployed benefit. This last is a very large class. One example of how a claim is effected may be given: A woman, say a cotton operative, marries and removes to another district where there are no cotton mills. She applies for work as a cotton operative at the local employment exchange. Then, because there is no work locally for cotton operatives, she claims, and receives, the dole, on the ground that “no suitable occupation” can be found for her. All the time she is really occupied in looking after her home. Other examples of the legal abuse of the dole, which is spreading with amazing rapidity, are those in which by collusion between employers and employed it is used as a subsidy for wages.

The basis of this is the fact that a man or woman may work three days a week and claim benefit as unemployed for the remaining period. Employers therefore arrange to employ one set of men for half a week and another set for the other half, and the dole becomes an addition to wages, which are by no means inadequate without it.

This system is now in extensive operation among dockers, miners, and steel workers.

Its origin—still its principal home—is among the dock workers of South Wales. Official figures quoted in the House of Commons show that in Cardiff, Barry, and Penarth alone are 1400 men earning not less than £4 every week for three days’ work, and drawing the dole for the remaining days. Finally there are the immense number of cases, many of them on the border-line of fraud, who have been brought into benefit by the removal by the Socialist Government of the old proviso that they must be “genuinely seeking work.” It is computed ■ that not fewer' than 120,000 people have been added to the "unemployed” by this means.