FAMILY ALLOWANCES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 August 1938, Page 2

FAMILY ALLOWANCES

OBSERVATIONS BY MR AMERY. The debate on the report of the Unemployment Assistance Board in the House of Commons gave Mr L. S. Amery, M.P., an opportunity of advocating the adoption of family allowances. Mr Amery said: —“The question is: Are we as a nation, regarding the interest of the growing generation, to decide that our wage system for men when employed, as well as our payments to those who are out of work, shall take some account, at any rate, of the minimum needs of a family, or that it shall be governed entirely by the value of the work to the individual employer and labour treated simply as a commodity, the price of which is to be settled by higgling in the market, without any regard to the family responsibilities of the worker? The present uncorrected flat-rate-of-wage system means in its social aspect, wherever you have large families of children, that the coming of every additional child is a hardship, not only to the parents, but to all the rest of the family and to itself The larger the family, the fewer the rooms they are crowded into, the less food they have for each child. It is a serious thing that surveys of milk consumption in working class households have shown how rapidly the consumption of milk per head falls in the larger families; in other words, how rapidly it falls just where the needs of it is greatest. The whole burden of poverty falls hardest upon those children who. come into existence in large families and, is itself a cause of the creation of poverty. Children are both the creators and the sufferers of poverty in large families,”