UNEMPLOYMENT.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXXII, Issue 2767, 26 August 1931, Page 5

UNEMPLOYMENT.

IN UNITED STATES. UNPRECEDENTED IN HISTORY. Unemploynient in the United States is once more prominent in the news. It is a crisis unprecedented in American history. An industrial depression in 1921 threw 5,000,000 out of work, but that was merely a temporary crisis. The present one began in 1929, but was thought to be temporary also, In March, 1930, the unemployment figure was 3,000,000. By November it had grown to . nearly 4,000,000. It had then become plain that recovery would be long delayed, and President Hoover appointed the former director of the Harding Unemployment Commission of 1921 (Colonel Woods) to supervise Federal measures. The result was what the President described as “the greatest programme of water-way, harbour, flood control, public highway and airway improvement in all our history.” The plans and preliminary organisation of these schemes must necessarily take some time. Meanwhile the total of unemployed had reached by June last the staggering figure of 8,000,000, or 168 out of every 1,000 workers, and strong pressure is being used to force the Administration to inaugurate a scheme of State-subsidised relief. The President apparently is so firmly convinced of the danger of such measures that he is determined to use every possible means to avoid them. He has now appointed the head of one of the biggest American business corporations to create a “super-organ-isation” to meet the unemployed crisis in the coming winter. Mr Hoover’s fight against the “dole” will be watched with close attention overseas.