UNEMPLOYMENT RELIEF

Evening Star, Issue 25617, 18 October 1945, Page 5

UNEMPLOYMENT RELIEF

GOVERNMENT FACES £300,000 PAY-OUT COAL POSITION MORE SERIOUS SYDNEY, October 17. Unless an early settlement is reached, tke Commonwealth Government faces the prospect of having to pay upwards of £300,000 in unemployment relief to 180,000 workers who have been thrown idle by electricity rationing. The income tax and pay-roll tax on the £1,000,000 in -wages that the strike is costing a week will also be lost by the Federal Treasury. The Chairman of the Bunnerong Strike Committee denied to-day that the strikers had broken down their original claim for a 36-hour week and were prepared -to accept a 40-hour week, with penalty rates for week-end work. The cessation of electrical power to hospitals would be equivalent to passing the death sentence on three persons in J' iron lungs,'' and it,, would jeopardise the lives of hundreds of other patients and provide hazards too

horrible to contemplate for 450 tiny child patients in one Sydney hospital. This forecast of the effect that the Bunnerong dispute may have by the week-end if the generation of power ceases was made by the State Minister of Health, Mr C. A. Kelly. Sydney hospitals are threatened with a crisis unparalleled in the State's history. He added that hospitals in Sydney depend for their very existence on a continuity of the electricity supply'. It is impossible to operate "iron lungs manually. . . The coal position is becoming so serious that it threatens to overshadow the Bunnerong dispute. More than 5 000 miners are idle to-day, and 19 mines are out of production, causing the loss of nearly 18,000 tons of coal.