FAMILY PAY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 6 February 1926, Page 14

FAMILY PAY.

A FRENCH EXPERIMENT. VOLUNTARY WAGE-FUNDS. SUCCESS OF THE TRIAL. During the election campaign the subject of family allowances was discussed, but chiefly from the party advantage standpoint. . Little was done to assess the merits of various proposals, or to consider the information made available by the Labour Bureau of the League of Nations. In the following article a correspondent of the Times gives interesting detailed information of the experiments made in France.

The question of family allowances has at last caught the attention of the public (writes the correspondent). Some hasty partisans would even launch it forthwith in the political cockpit. The project, like most practical ideas of wide scope, provokes controversy by the confusions that cling to it no less than by its intrinsic difficulties. It is odious to some because it seems bo belong to the same order of ideas as “equal pay for equal work,” or to reecho an aggressive feminism. Other critics, nervously alarmed for the pure “economic” basis of remuneration — namely, work done—take a high line against remuneration according to need. Many another is hostile because he or she scents in family allowances a new phase of etatosme and a new dole. The crusade which Miss Eleanor Rathbone has led from obscurity to recognition has reached its first objective. It has the ear of a large public. But how are the aims of the crusaders to be conceived, and what method do they favour?

When certain compromising associations are stripped away, the question of family allowances becomes a plain question of wages. The British wagesystem is dominated by the device of the flat-rate. The young journeymen, newly promoted to full rates, are the equals of tlieir own fathers, their elder brothers, tlieir uncles, and even their "grandfathers in respect of income. If they incur family responsibilities their standard of living falls in due course. The last census showed the men over 20 as having on the average eightninths of one child of dependent age, while the fathers of families of four or more, who numbered only 6.7 per cent, of the adult men, had no less than 37 per cent, of all children of dependent age to tlieir account. The present dispensation of average or “flat” rates takes very little account of those full quivers. The average, moreover, is not an ordinance of Nature, but an artifice, and a recent one. It sums up the technique of present-day unionism ; that is all. The wage inequalities of bygone times reflected differ-

ences not only of skill and power, but also of need. The same causes are at work in these increment scales, lasting well into middle-age, which many business and professional employees enjoy. They settle down into good bourgeois husbands and fathers, and some of them into greater efficiency. _ Many increment scales are but disguised family allowances, and few scales, if anv, are without the allowance motive. The Irish Free State Government recently abolished the disguises in its civil service by substituting the allowances for the scales. THE SYSTEM IN FRANCE.

It. is chiefly the wage-earner that is sacrificed to the equality fetish, and the. sacrificial knife is tlie clumsy mechanism of trade union policy. How, then, is the tyranny of the flat-rate to be broken ? The melancholy obsession of the present age favours action by tlie State. Many of the supporters or family allowances contemplate no other method. Tlie propaganda of the movement is vaguely but persuasively Socialistic. The public at large suppose the matter to be still in the realm of’ speculation and theory. In reality it is not so, for one great nation lias put family allowances in force on the largest scale, and in certain other countries sectional and experimental measures have been adopted. But it is only in France tha tfamily allowances can be studied as an established and accepted system. The motives that underlie the system have been misjudged in many quarters. It is as false to trace what the French have done exclusively to solicitude for. a low birth rate as to rule out suce a motive entirely. If thd system is to be judged by its effect on natality it must be confessed a failure. The truly French element is regard for the family as a unit, even in industry. To do justly aud humanely by . the families that exist is. an imperious policy; to plot and plan for those that do not would be a dreary garble. Solicitude for the family, good ideals of employership, and the business motive of increasing goodwill in work aT© the bases of the system.

WAR-TIME DEVELOPMENT. From slow and small beginnings the movement has ripened rapidly in recent years. More than a generation ago some of the French railways, the Nord, the Orleans, and the P.L.M., introduced modest bonuses for the dependents .of tlieir workpeople. Since 1900 similar bonuses have beeip spreading in the coal mines. The Government applied the idea, first, in the fighting services and afterwards throughout State employment. The decisive period for private industry of the ordinary type dates from ' the pioneer scheme to the Regis-Joya metal works of Grenoble. The bonuses for dependents which M. Romanet established in 1916 soon found imitators in other metal-working firms of the district. Bv the end of the war these

bonuses had become a constant feature of the wage awards of the regional Comites de Conciliation, of which Mr., Albert Thomas was the author. The Armistice ended the career of the Comite, but not before both employers and workpeople had become used to the bonuses and prejudiced in their favour. Grenoble again led the way. The metal firms formed th.emselves into a oaisse de compensation, a co-opera-tive "pool,” each paying a levy into the “pool,” according to its magnitude, and drawing from the "pool” on an agreed scale for its family men. Similar caisses were formed ail over France, some on a trade and others on a district basis. Last June these caisses numbered 176. Their federation, tlie “Comite Central des Alloca. tions Familiales,” is one of the most interesting sociological agencies of France.

MAJORITY OF WORKERS INCLUDED.

Three-quarters of all industrial -workers are employed under the guarantee of family allowances, and the proportion rises steadily. In factories, mines, railways, and the Government services tlie system is general or universal. It is spreading rapidly in commerce, and it has begun to spread in agriculture. Vast sums are distributed monthly in bonuses, the amounts and conditions of which vary from district to district, and, where the caisses are organised on a trade basis, from trade to trade. In the great district caisse of Paris (general section) the bonus for six dependent children is 330 francs monthly. .L(At par rate of exchange 25 franc§ equal £l.)- At Marseilles the bonus is about 20 per cent, higher, at Grenoble about 45 per cent, lower. In some favoured districts, where the cost of living is low, the bonuses amount to no more than 2 per cent, of the wages bill. In the industrial north tlie figure rises to 5 per cent or 6 per cent. On the P.L.M. railway system the figure is 7.5 per-cent.