THE BUILDING BUBSIDY.

Waikato Times, Volume 112, Issue 18805, 29 November 1932, Page 9

THE BUILDING BUBSIDY.

\ . (To the Editor.) Sir,—l read to-day where they reckon the building subsidy has been a great success in stimulating building industry, because the total value of building work, £900,000, has been approved of for the subs dy and the number of workers who will have received some employment at their own trade union rates of pay, when the contracts are finished will total over 8000. Now this success seems all right to those workers and others who are receiving different rates of pay from those workers on relief works from a “certain point of view of economy”; but, nevertheless, it is not true economy and sucoess according to working class ideals and aspirations, and the “historic mission of labour for one section of the working class to profit or otherwise at the expense of another section. It is not success and true economy when it becomes a; case of every man for himself, where the weaker members of the human family are concerned, and the devil takes the hindmost, even more so now than before the unemployment fund came into existence, for all and sundry of the strong members of the human family dip Into and take advantage of it these times of stress and national travail. The fund should be administered more equitably •than it is at the present time, so that allocations to relief workers are not cut down through giving subsidies to private enterprise, and the B2 men and the unfit men should not be excluded from the unemployment insurance fund. B2 men and the unfit men should be either given work or some benefit so long as they pay into the fund, or should he exempt from paying unemployment levy and emergency tax. Otherwise the whole business, as far as these men are concerned, paying into the fund and receiving no benefit out of it becomes farcical and hypocritical in the extreme. These men’s state becomes worse than it was before the unemployment fund was thought of.—l am, ENGINE DRIVER. Newton, Auckland, Nov. 26, 1932.