UNEMPLOYMENT FUNDS

Taranaki Daily News, 11 April 1935, Page 11

UNEMPLOYMENT FUNDS

ANSWER TO CRITICISM METHODS OF EXPENDITURE. DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN’S REVIEW. f . — Unemployment, not only in NewZealand, but the world over, remains one of our greatest unsolved problems. Very many causes for this problem have been suggested, amongst them being the complete collapse of international credit; over-production and under-consumption; the dead-weight burden of international war and other debts; displacement of millions of workers through highly specialised mechanisation, more commonly called “rationalisation of industry ’; the failure to maintain a proper balance between spending and saving. Thus Mr. Walter Bromley, deputy-chairman of the Unemployment Board, prefaced an address to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday. The International Labour Office states that Germany heads the list of unemployed with 2,764,676 in March, Britain had 2,272,107, and Italy 1,011,711 in February; Belgium, France, the Irish Free State, Poland’, and Holland also show increases, continued. Mr. Bromley. Perhaps it is because the problem is so great, taxing as it does the skill and the wit of the statesmen of the world, that so very many persons who have no responsibility for putting their theories into practice so confidently claim to hold the key to the solution. The real problem on which the Unemployment Board is engaged is really supplementary to the major problem of unemployment. It is a question of arranging and putting into effect a redistribution of the incomes of those remaining in employment in order that widespread distress and privation may be avoided. Stated another way, it has the job of taking some of the income earned by those engaged in . industry and giving it out again to those whom industry has rejected. Truly no position offers such wide scope for winning personal unpopularity. Should this world of ours ever reach such a height of moral and spiritual development as to make it possible that such a law as our Unemployment Act could be administered without incurring criticism, then I fancy that in such a social atmosphere unemployment as we know it would certainly perish. Criticism, then, we must have.

CRITICISM PARDONABLE. The criticism of the unfortunate unemployed worker, or of his wife, is indeed pardonable. I trust that I shall never think less kindly of them, or treat them with less courtesy or with less justice, because they become impatient with the administration. Criticism of the administration by the politician—well, we all understand that. The criticism of the disinterested section of the community, although often ill-founded often causes me to feel quite cheered because to me it denotes a lively awakening of the body politic to personal individual responsibility in the question of relief of distress caused through involuntary unemployment. The estimated expenditure on relief

direct and indirect for the four weeks ' from February 23, 1935, is £324,800, in addition to which, authorised under the Public Accounts estimates by Parliament

itself, an estimated amount, of £12,640 was provided for administration, making a total estimated expenditure for the four weeks of £337,440. If that figure were maintained for each of the thirteen four-weekly periods it would total £4,386,720. Our estimate of revenue for the year was £4,494,00. These figures will discount the idea that the board is deliberately conserving funds in face of need.

What everyone seems anxious to know

is, how is this huge amount of money disbursed? Who gets it? The largest item on the list, the amount required against scheme 5, accounts for £191,315, or 56.7 per cent, of the total. To further dissect this time, £151,828 was for rationed part-time employment; £10,031 represents subsidies paid to local bodies on the basis of scheme 5, the condition being

that further money is found to provide standard wages, and in most cases of this kind, full-time employment is also insisted on; ’£13,408 is for country work in camps organised by county councils where men are engaged at special rates on road work and land development; while the balance of £16,048 is the amount paid to gold prospectors operating through county councils and mm 5- " executives. Next come sustenance payments and rations, including payments to a few gold prospectors who are unable to operate through a ' county council, amounting to £32J938, including sustenance payments amounting to £l2OO to men under the small farm plan. SUSTENANCE AND RATIONS. Next come payments made through the Public Works Department, including wages and keep for men in single men’s camps,, together with subsidies in respect of married men whose wages are made up to standard from the Public Works Department fund. This item accounts for £26,928. Further items paid through other State departments include £1176 for re-employment of unemployed school teachers, £3240 for relief of natives through the Native Land Settlement Board. The Lands Department, Agriculture and Forestry expended £11,633. These items are mainly direct wages, and, added to the scheme 5 amount bring the total now accounted for to £267,230 or 79.2 per cent, of the total. Next we have farm schemes; 4A now discontinued, except where assistance is being given to a worker to establish himself on his own farm; 4B where a subsidy of 50 per cent, of the labour cost of a purely developmental contract is met from the unemployment fund; assistance to rabbiters, pocket money to youths learning farming, .and including subsidies under the 8B gold-mining scheme. These payments,, totalling £12,160, are all wages payments, and are operated through private, persons who generally augment the wages to standard rates. Our total is now £279,390 or 82.8 per cent. The whole of 'these payments now accounted for are in the class of direct payments to the unemployed. The remaining items in the main, although not direct payments to • the unemployed, often provide a more substantial, though indirect, benefit. A total of £34,600 represents building subsidies promoting the expenditure of an amount in wages within New Zea-■’-nd seven times greater than the amount of the subsidies paid. Of all the criticism levelled against the Unemployment Board’s’policy, I think the criticism of the building subsidies has been the most ill-informed and the most unfair.

A further £1760 is the amount paid in subsidies on flax exported. This one item most eloquently emphasises the damage suffered by a New Zealand industry as a result of the depression. Once a great employer of labour, the flax industry was 'almost exterminated. Although the wages being paid to the workers engaged in the industry to-day are so low that often labour resists leaving relief work on scheme 5 to take up jobs in the flax swamps, the cost of production still exceeds the market price of fibre on the English market, the exchange advantage notwithstanding, and the flax miller, once upon a time an im-

portant client of the income-tax collector, is to-day for the most part carrying on at the pleasure of his banker. This subsidy payment, if not pdid direct to unemployed men, is certainly keeping men off the register of unemployed. The sum of £360 represents assistance to the timber industry by way of'subsidies to millers to enable New Zealand manufactured fruit cases to be used in place of imported cases. There is an item of £1154 representing grants to gold prospectors. This represents equipment issued to gold prospectors, and although put through our accounts as a gra-t or grants, it in part comes back from deductions of gold won by the ctors, who had materials or equipment advanced. Repayments of grar x - including wages subsidies advanced under our gold mining scheme No. 88, and assistance to private concern " ' the past year, have averaged £6" ■ month. A few other smaller items, covering grants to women’s com- - £BGI, sundry loans £2600, and miscellaneous £2036, Humphrey’s Gully wate- £432 (all wages), insurance of relief workers £lOOO and surveys £6OB to the total of £324,800, or f cent., which, with the amount for administration mentioned earlier, £12.640. gives us the total for the four i of £337,440.