Hospital Boards and Unemployment

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21411, 1 March 1935, Page 12

Hospital Boards and Unemployment

At its meeting on Wednesday the North Canterbury Hospital Board very properly refused a request from the Minister for Employtnent that it should accept responsibility for granting relief to the dependents of those relief workers who had failed to accept reasonable employment or who had been dismissed from employment for insubordination, malingering, or other reasons. There, it is to be hoped, the matter will end; but the Minister's request throws such a curious light on the methods and ideas of the Unemployment Board that it cannot be allowed to pass without comment. In the first two years of th,e depression, it will be remembered, the hospital boards had to provide sustenance for all unemployed men who could not be given relief work, an obligation which involved most of them in serious financial difficulties. The hospital boards argued, and rightly, that their legal obligation to provide "charitable relief" had been inserted in the Hospital and Charitable Institutions Act, not as a means of relieving unemployment, but as a means of preventing distress due to illness or incapacity. In 1932, realising that it was not in the interests either of the hospital boards or of the unemployed themselves that thousands of able-bodied I workers and their dependents should be recipients of charitable relief, the Government ruled that all cases of distress due to unemployment should be a charge on the Unemployment Board and that charitable relief should be restricted to " unemployables" and their dependents. On both social and administrative grounds that is obviously the best arrangement. Yet for some reason which is difficult to understand it has been accepted most grudgingly by the Unemployment Board. Efforts by the Unemployment Board to thrust part of the financial burden of unemployment on the hospital boards have been the cause of innumerable wrangles; and in some cases, it seems, the unemployed have been the sufferers. It is a pity that the Minister himself should have been a party to this latest attempt to vary a clear and sensible ruling.