NORTHERN DAILY THURSDAY, MAY 23, 1929. UNEMPLOYMENT RELIEF

Northern Advocate, 23 May 1929, Page 4

NORTHERN DAILY

THURSDAY, MAY 23, 1929. UNEMPLOYMENT RELIEF

Registered for Transmission Through ■the Post as a Newspaper.

The problem of dealing with unemployment is one of the first concerns of social workers. It is also the bug bear of Governments and local authorities. The existence of unemployment lias proved the downfall of governments not responsible for industrial conditions which have caused distress to worldcss people. In like manner, promised Solutions of the problem have .put into power political parties who ; have discovered that theory and practice in the cure of unemployment arc very different matters. The general election in Britain, like that held in New' Zealand a few months ago, is being fought very largely on the unemployment issue, and the party which offers the most plausible scheme for the provision of work for everybody will probably faro best at the polls. And this despite the fact that history proves there is no royal road to the relief of unemployment. It is interesting, and decidedly instructive, to recall the methods adopted in Britain to solve tins problem, for though the conditions existing in Britain and in New Zealand are not parallel, there is sufficient similarity for British efforts to be of educational value to the people of the Dominion. There is, of course, nothing now' in the proposal to use the pow'er and resource of the State in order to create emergency employment. In Queen Elizabeth’s time, the Poor Law first undertook the

responsibility of “sotting the poor on work,” arid 37th and 18th century history is full of experiments and suggestions —road work laec wink, sj>inning, and weaving—devised with that object. The theory that work of some kind, even if it consisted only in harnessing nieii to parish carts, was preferable to.relief without work persisted until 1894, and the “Macadamisation” of the roads was perhaps Hi" most useful of the expedients introduced. The Poor Law of .1894 established a sharp distinction between wage-earning and relief; it undertook responsibility for maintenance, while declining responsibility for providing work. ;But recourse to artificial wirk in emergencies continued. It was the easiest way of tiding over difficulties and of comforting uninformed opinion. In 18(5(1 Mr Chamberlain revived the idea of municipal relief works as a method of alleviating (exceptional distress. And both then and later, under Mr Chamberlain's successors, the wellmeant efforts of vestries, borough councils, and distress committees to increase employment ended in little more than temporary projects to anticipate improvements and repairs, to lay our parks and graveyards, to whitewash railway arches, even to substitute brooms for road-sweeping machines. Such schemes all alike illustrate the inherent difficulty of providing emergency work which is Suitable for every kind of applicant, which keeps the skilled man ready to return to his regn lar trade, and which does not interfere with the labour market and so diminish employment elsewhere. The question naturally arises: Would this inherent difficulty bo lessened if the schemes of work were regarded as national investments and framed on a much larger scale, and if, at the end of two or three years, a large army of workers 'had been enlisted and taught to rely on the State for their support? The Unemployment Insurance Acts which began in 39.11 and received their last expansion in .1927, opened a more hopeful chapter in Britain’s efforts to deal Avith unemployment. But no insurance scheme can cover the whole field of casual labour, and the expansion of these Acts has not prevented recurrence to relief works. The out-of-work donation of 1918, which cost the State some 60 millions in 38 months, at a time when unemployment was by no means high, was followed by a period of acute depression, which sent the number of unemployed up to 2,558,000. In 1920-21 an Unemployment Grants Committee introduced fresh schemes for public works, to be started by local authorities in area? where unemployment was especially severe. These schemes, however, which were intended to be quite different from anything that had gone before, proved quite as disappointing as any of the relief schemes of older days. Their cost w r as .tremendous. The report of the Industrial Transference Board (1028) estimates that since the Armistice (exclusive of schemes under the Trade Facilities Acts) comprehensive programmes of works in relief of unemployment, up to the value of some £190,000,000, have been approved, but that these large schemes have at no one date employed more than 75,000 men, of whom many worked for short spells only. There Would seem to be no escape from the conclusion that State aided schemes of work have, so far, only served to distract attention from the real difficulties of the problem. In New Zealand, where development work of various kinds may bo expected to prove of national value, the problem confronting the Government is necessarily less complex than that which faces the authorities in Britain, but the existence of unemployment certainly calls for the exercise of statesmanship which must not be influenced by expediency.