UNEMPLOYMENT RATES.

Evening Star, Issue 22274, 27 February 1936, Page 10

UNEMPLOYMENT RATES.

A long-standing grievance of relief workers in the.rural unci semi-rural districts promises to be met by tho Labour Government’s decision to raise their rates of pay to the city level. As a logical accompaniment; sustenance allowances for men unable to work or for whonl no work can be found will be raised in the same way. Relief rates in tlie country have been till now the same as sustenance rates in .the town. Tho inequality that is to be rectified has been appreciable. The wage paid by the Unemployment Board to an unmarried relief worker in the towns has been 17s a week; the allowance to a sustenance worker (unmarried) 14s. In the country the corresponding figures have been 14s and 12s. For a man with three children the comparison would be. 39s (365); 36s (335). The excuse for paying less rates in tho country has always been that a man can live there more cheaply. Rent will cost him less. He has more chance of eking but his allowance by keeping fowls, and a lew pigs, or a cow. The argument would be stronger with a different definition for “ country.” "What may be true of the country proper is much less true of Port Chalmers or Green Island, and like areas, included in the term. A man living in one of those,centres might, be as ill-situated for keeping a cow, as if he were in the city. The expenses of himself and his family . probably will be increased by the frequent necessity of coming to town to confer* with the Unemployment Bureau and for other purposes. The man in the country who pays less for rent may pay more for a variety of other provisions, only to be obtained from town. The advantages of rural or semi-rural residence are not so easy to compute. Probably the strongest excuse which the Unemployment Board and Ministers in charge of it have had in insisting on a different scale of relief payments has been that • they lacked funds to do more than they were doing. The “ stand-down ” week, which accentuated hardships of the extra-urban districts, was abolished, but the difference in disbursals has continued. The new Government is not going to be deterred by lack of funds. Mr Armstrong stated, a few weeks ago, that the income of the Unemployment Board was £67,000 a week, and it was spending £IOO,OOO- In spite of that disparity, it was added by the Minister that the country rates would be" raised to the city standard, and the promise has been reaffirmed. The city rates for relief work in Dunedin are actually higher than'those which we have quoted, the allocations made by the Unemployment Board being subsidised by the council. The Minister has laid down a new policy that all relief work which is thought worth continuing shall. be paid for, by one means or another, at a rate “ at least equivalent to the-national standard for the class of work performed.” It is that prospect, we assume, which' makes the Minister assess the cost of equalising town and country rates, for both relief work and sustenance, at .an extra £3O-000 a week. An increase on higher, wages of the unemployment tax can therefore :be taken for granted. Equalisation will have a benefit beyorid its first one if it keeps more -of the hard-pressed people in the country, discouraging their drift to the towns. The new step, however, makes no progress towards curing unemployment; its influence may be rather to perpetuate it, or to perpetuate a system of more or less artificial work which would not be required, if normal work were more plentiful, and men had more incentive to find it. ( Nor will public works fill the blank, unless, they are works which are genuinely required and will repay their cost. Except for increasing wages, the new Government’s plans for unemployment scarcely differ from those of the discredited Unemployment Board, whose last -report suggests more assistance to secondary industries, and also land development, as means of providing .permanent employment, .