The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 31, 1934. STIMULATING THE LABOUR MARKET.

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 108, 31 January 1934, Page 8

The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 31, 1934. STIMULATING THE LABOUR MARKET.

The Minister of Employment has done well to answer the petulant and ill-informedl of the building subsidy scheme that has lately become one of the mainstays of his opponents. ’ both he and the Unemployment Board could ' Vlt h advan ?^ e h be . to oiovment Fund, it is argued, is subscribed by the community for the unemployed, not for employers of labour, who m some cases may be S companies. This is an excellent argument.in theory; but its chamnions lose sight completely of the practical issue. For fear of helping an employer they would refuse to help unemployed tradesmen S A regular worker looks to private employment for his living, the relief worker lopks unwillingly to the Unemployment Fund o save him from starvation. No person who can d these two attitudes of mind ought to object to any reasonable scheme to transter X from the one dass to the other. The confusion comes of approaching the position from the wrong side, and assuming that only a P choice of employments is involved—not, as is the fact, a choice between idleness and industry, between charity and independence between humiliation and self-respect. Both the private master and the Unemployment Board offer “work.” From the employees side, however, it is at once apparent that to apply that one word alike to full-time private employment at one’s own trade and to relict wor-. is to invite confusion. The man in steady work is reasonably secure, contented, and able to provide for his dependents. The man on relief has had the foundations of happiness cut from under him. He is discontented, disheartened, and often forced to endure privation in h ' S h This then is the choice before the Unemployment Board: (1), To accept unemployment as an inevitable burden on society, to look no further than relief work, and to resign itself to perpetuating hopelessness in the breasts of seventy thousand men; or (2) lo set as its goal the reabsorption in productive work, at standard wages, of every unemployed man; and to plan to assist that end by injecting Unemployment Fund moneys into the anaemic veins of private industry. Only a fool or an enemy of the State would advocate the first course. The board chose the second. With what success the figures quoted by Mr. Hamilton show. ' It has to be admitted that some employers tried to take advantage of the No. 10 scheme to save thqjr own pockets; probably a few succeeded. But which state of affairs is preferable-—4OOO men on relief work, capital frozen in the banks, and the taxpayer calmly contemplating a lifetime of the unemployment tax; or the same 4000 men at work on full wages in their own trades, money put into circulation, and relief for the taxpayer from two quarters: increased business and an easing of the demand for unemployment expenditure? The Unemployment Fund offers no permanent hope to the unemployed, although the tax from which it derives is a real drag on many lower-paid wage-earners. What does promise hope is the early recovery of the private labour market, a recovery which the No. 10 scheme was designed to aid and did aid. We urge the Minister and the Unemployment-Board to take heart from their first major experiment in this direction, and to seek to extend it. The great bulk of the unemployed want work, not camouflaged charity.