The Dominion. SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 1921. CAUSES OF UNEMPLOYMENT

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 95, 15 January 1921, Page 6

The Dominion. SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 1921. CAUSES OF UNEMPLOYMENT

According to one of yesterday’s cablegrams, the British Government is endeavouring to meet the Labour demand for such an investigation of unemployment as will go to the root of the trouble. There is room for a similar investigation in all countries which possess developed or developing industries, if only in order that a clear demonstration may be afforded of the extent to which unemployment is occasioned by the mistaken policy of some of those upon whom its hardships chiefly fall. No investigation is needed to bring out the.broad fact that industrial strife is one of the chief causes of unemployment. This is already apparent. The results of a systematic investigation, if they were clearly set out, might, however, secure for this aspect of the problem the practical attention it is at present commonly denied. Tho need of going to the root of the unemployment question is nowhere more painfully evident than in the United Kingdom. At a surface view the increasing displacement of labour in that country is largely explained by the difficulty of finding markets in the war-impovensh-ed countries to which Britain normally exports large quantities of manufactured goods. The British people cannot by their own efforts find a complete remedy for this state of affairs, but it is open to them to hasten the re-establishment of normal conditions of trade by lifting industrial production to the highest attainable level of efficiency. Obviously the strikes and industrial disorders which have been rife in recent times have cut down industrial efficiency and thus have done much to bring about the tragic conditions in which considerably more than a million British workers are out of employment. Any investigation which goes to the root of the trouble must concentrate attention on the effect and bearing on unemployment of strikes and other forms of industrial strife. The first great step towards a remedy is to set the facts clearly before the workers and ask them whether they arc content any longer to tolerate a policy which is undertaken ostensibly in their interests, but in fact .subjects them to intolerable hardships. The one promising feature of the present situation in the United Kingdom is that it seems impossible any longer to evade or trifle with this vital question. AU sorts of relief measures and palliatives are being employed, but they leave the essential problem practically untouched. Since the armistice, the British Government has paid out 57 millions sterling in unemployment donations'—-35 millions of this amount in out-of-work donations to ex-Sorvice men—and . another five millions will be provided under this head up to the end of the financial year. Ten millions have been provided to subsidise the construction of arterial roads by provincial authorities, and several millions per annum are devoted to subsidising the new unemployment insurance scheme, which covers twelve million workers as compared with four million insured under the Act of 1911. Big as they are, those items of expenditure will go but a little way towards relieving the mass of suffering occasioned by unemployment on the scale it threatens to attain in the near future, and it is obvious that they leave a permanent remedy as far off as ever. When the utmost effect of such palliatives has been exhausted it remains supremely necessary to arrive at such an organisation of industry that unemployment will be reduced to the smallest possible scale, and this implies first and foremost tho abandonment of industrial strife and the substitution of methods more in accord with reason and common sense. It is not, of course, suggested that industrial peace offers in itself a complete remedy for unemployment, but undoubtedly it represents tho only condition in which a complete remedy can be worked out and applied. Irrespective of industrial strife, there are factors of imperfect ./nd inefficient industrial organisation which entail waste and tend periodically to produce unemployment, but industrial peace is the first and most essential condition of the better organisation of industry. Harmony and co-opera-tion arc indispensable if industry is to be so systematised that profitable employment will be continuously available for all willing workers. It would, of course, be absurdly unjust to charge the organised workers in any country with being solely responsible for the ruling conditions of industrial strife” but it is well within the facts to sa.y that in British and other countries important sections of organised Labour are pursuing a, policy which makes recurring unemployment on a serious scale jnevitaUle. The effects of this policy in causing unemployment and blocking an approach to better conditions are at present written large in Great Britain, in America, and nearer at hand in Australia, where unemployment, which is already on a serious scale, is being increased daily as the result of a strike declared on what seem to he absolutely trivial grounds. With such object lessons before tKcir eyes, workers everywhere have good reasons for asking themselves whether it is wise, or consistent with their own welfare and that of their wives

and children, to go on supporting leaders whoso one aim seems to bo the promotion of an unending succession of strikes and upheavals. Systematic investigation which would bring out and demonstrate in detail the effects of this policy is, of course, desirable, but tho broad facts are already well defined and no worker is studying his own interests who neglects to examine and consider these facts on their merits. It hardly needs to be added that questions of this kind are of much more than academic interest to tho people of New Zealand. This country is particularly fortunate as regards conditions that make for settled employment and prosperity, but the policy which is doing so much to occasion and extend unemployment in otlxD' countries can only lead to the ijame results here if it is carried far enough. In a measure it has done so in the past, and at the present moment a national upheaval in the coal industry is threatened, over a petty question of local regulation. Such an upheaval at the. present stage might easily have disastrous results in spreading unemployment and in other ways. It is surely full time that the workers of the Dominion should ask themselves whether it is right that such things should happen, or should even be threatened.