UNEMPLOYMENT RELIEF POLICY

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 226, 21 June 1935, Page 10

UNEMPLOYMENT RELIEF POLICY

Recent criticism of unemployment relief policy was • neatly crystallised in a motion passed yesterday by the annual conference of the New Zealand Returned Soldiers’ Association, urging upon the Government:

(1) That major public works of a reproductive value ... should be initiated as early as possible, wages to be paid at .r; (2) That the No. 5 scheme .should be gradually withdrawn; and (3) That until the above policy can be carried out, relief rates of pay and sustenance payments should be increased. ,

The Government is already extending its public works programme; although not specifically as a measure of unemployment relief; the ultimatum from the Wellington City Council will raise the whole question of the future of the No. 5 scheme; and the Minister, as chairman of the Unemployment Board, announces this morning slight •increases in relief and sustenance benefits —two shillings a week for single men and three shillings for married men. This falls far short of the ten shillings that has been asked; but the Minister claims that to grant ten shillings would be beyond the capacity of the fund, and in support quotes an estimate of probable revenue (made by the board’s “financial advisers”) which seemsrather unduly pessimistic. A benefit increase of ten shillings, however, is far from being the most urgent need in the community’s handling of unemployment. Much more important is employment —not on relief, not on a swollen programme of public works, but in the ordinary course of production and trade. The sooner the unemployed get back into regular jobs the happier they will be. Relief is a stop-gap only ; attempts to prolong it beyond the period of- necessity (as by undertaking necessary works by use of relief labour) or to make it needlessly attractive to the man out of work (as by raising relief “wages” nearly to the level of those normally paid for unskilled labour) are equally wrong. The first course smacks of jumping on a man when he is down; the second would be a direct incentive to indolence. When the Unemplovment Board has money to spare, its duty will be to look beyond the present and to concentrate its efforts upon stimulating private emplovment, which alone will solve this stubborn social problem.