FAMILY ENDOWMENT

Taranaki Daily News, 30 January 1930, Page 14

FAMILY ENDOWMENT

A WELLrTRIED SYSTEM 1 LARGER PAYMENTS IN FRANCE." SOCIAL BETTERMENT OBTAINED. So far the family endowment huihanitariari scheme has not secured any hold in Australia or New Zealand. ■ Legislation was -introduced in the New South Wales Parliament, but the Bill was shelved. It is interesting to note that a system of family .allowances has been working smoothly in : France for years. It was originated by employers, has been financed solely and voluntarily by, employers, arid is absolutely free of Government control. It is rapidly growing.in popularity, and is revolutionising certain aspects of French wwking-claes life. “Allocations familiales,” as-these allocations are called in France, were the invention of a group of business men in the Grenoble district during the years immediately, before the war. Seeking to. establish community of. interest between capital and workers, they decided to fill . vacancies in their employment with married men rather than with single ones, and to pay these married men extra allowances based ori.the number of children they possessed'. The allowance, it was ■ ’agreed, should be in addition to the. ordinary;standard trade union wages and should be paid entirely by . the employers, without counter liability of any kind bn the .part of the recipients,. The Economist states that this system worked well for a year or two, and tln.n the Grenoble employers made a curious discovery. They found that, although the pledge that they had. given to each other was a purely voluntary one, human nature was proving. top strong for them, and that they were often yielding to tho temptation to take on single men, or men with only one child in preference to workers with large families. They decided that henceforward, although the extra allowances should continue to be paid out by the individual employer, the total to be distributed by the whole of the members of the association should be centralised in a speciallycreated office called a Caisse de Compensation, and the burden borne pro rata by the various firms on the basis of the total amount of wages paid by each firm. Finns that had paid more than their proper quota of allowances would thus at the periodical making up of accounts receive baxik the surplus, while those who had paid less than their quota were required to make up the difference. The system of “allocations familiales’’ has, since the armistice, spread over the whole of France, to tho unalloyed benefit of both employers and. employed. Reports presented at the ninth annual Congress Nationale des Allocations Fam-' iliales, which was recently held at Tours, showed that at -the end of 1928 over 25,000 firms were applying the system, or 5000 more than in 1927. These figures were grouped into 288 associations. The number of wage earners in respect of whom extra allowances was paid was 1,740,000, against 1,520,000 in 1927, representing with their wives and children, over 4,171,000, against 3,862,000 in 1927. Th j amount paid, in allocations familiales in 1928 was 292,000,000 francs, say £2,-330,00-0, or over £250,000 more than in the previous year. Talcing the whole country, the average scale of allowance is 4s 6d a month for the first child, rising to 116 francs (18.8 per cent.) for three, and to 328 francs (£1 12s lOd) if there are six.

The principle usually prevailing is that of “the larger -the family, the more per child.” The rates vary considerably according to trade, area and the cost of living. The allowances are paid direct to the mother, and in most of the associations special maternity allowances and “cradle premiums” are paid in respect of every new child. Sick pay is given I. many associations, while others provlT s nurses and doctors free and various other benefits.

The practical value of this huge system of social betterment is seen not only in the vastly better relations that now exist between French capital and labour, but also in many other directions. The birth rate in families enjoying these extra allowances is 5-0 per cent, higher than the general rate throughout France, and infantile mortality is 20 to 25 per cent less. In addition an increasingly large number of mothers of families are able to abstain from factory work, and devote themselves solely* to their homes — something approaching a social revolution in France. While working on common principles, each association is free to fix its own scale of allowances and programme of oilier benefits. Allocations familiales, the French employers say, have no relation to any form of work done, but solely concern moral and social order, with the whole idea of a purely humanitarian conception. The only danger the movement has constantly before it is that outside agitation may wreck the whole effort by securing the passage of a bill making the general application of the principle compulsory or ineoi-porating the system in the new national insurance scheme, which is just about to come into operation.