Unemployment Expenditure.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20100, 2 December 1930, Page 10

Unemployment Expenditure.

The Unemployment Board is apparently a little worried over its Christmas gift to local bodies of £25,000; and it would be disturbing if the facts vere otherwise. The Board must recognise that spending: money on unnecessary work, even when the motive is to provide Christmas comforts for cheerless homes, instead of solving the problem of unemployment, will in the long run make it worse. It will bo solved only when all those out of work are absorbed into regular and productive occupations, and if it is true that the claimants on the Unemployment Fund will shortly rise from 7400. to 10,000 by the inclusion of men who hitherto have not registered at Government Labour offices, the necessity for encouraging private employment is all the more urgent. Even with an estimated annual revenue of three-quarters of a million it will be impossible for the Board to do very much for each of the 10,000 men. It would bo far better to assist employers to engage additional men for the only purpose for which private employers ever wish to engage them, viz., to do necessary work —on farms first of all, but also in any other direction in which there is profitable work to be done. If a limit had to be set, as of course would be the case, the subsidy could be payable on the wages of those men only who had been added to the strength. The present system, which the Board's Christmas gift necessarily strengthens, will produce in time a permanent army of unemployed dependent for relief upon the proceeds of the special taxation; though it will help a little if the recipients of the grant really earn it .