Unemployed Returned Soldiers

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 227, 22 June 1936, Page 10

Unemployed Returned Soldiers

Sir, —During the progress of the Dominion conference of returned soldiers you published figures in reference to unemployment, stating the present position. They showed that as at present numerical strength we have left out of approximately 100,000 who left the shores of this Dominion something like 70,000 and out of this 70,000 one in every seven is not in employment. What a damning indictment against the present business world'. Does it not show how callously the “sackings” on a wholesale plan was carried out in 1930-31? ’

Where are all those promises made by our political leaders of that period and by a large number of our captains of industry? When approach is made to employers of labour to provide work for our less fortunate brethren, the reply is “I have no vacancies.”' How many of those employers could have, in the depression period, kept, say, one or even two of our returned men on at perhaps £2/10/- per week and so saved them the ignominy and insult, of parading before charity? Employers may say, “Oh, it would not have paid me." In reply I would point out: Did the men of 1914-18 worry about the price they were asked to pay? Yet for the expenditure of just a email portion of his dividends on. them, the employer throws his hands up in horror and says, “No, it would not pay me." In conclusion, let me say I challenge any employer of labour to look around in his business and see if he cannot find some nook a returned man can fill and in doing so don’t let the financial advantage of employing him weigh too heavily in your search, as neither finance nor even life itself for that matter weighed twopence in the minds of the men who “Did their bit.” You can do it; it’s not sentiment but sound economics, the elimination of waste, as all charity is really waste, and in making this statement I give charity its modern meaning and not its true meaning, and that is love. You employers had your interests well guarded in 1914-18, as you had far more to lose than the average “digger,” and it :a up to you to show that the damning indictment of. the foregoing figures is not merited. I challenge any employer with one of Haig’s last requests, and that is: “Men, can you do it?” —I am, etc., SOLDAT RENDU. Wellington, June 20.