COST OF WORRY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 February 1939, Page 5

COST OF WORRY

THIRTY MILLION A YEAR TO BRITAIN. GREAT FEAR OF INSECURITY. Worry costs Britain from £30,000,000 to £50.000,000 a year, according to Dr. Howard E. Collier, Director of Hygiene and Medicine of Birmingham University. The cost of illness and physical unfitness in Britain has been estimated at from £100,000,000 to £200,000,000 a year. Dr. Collier has recently returned from a visit to America, where he lived with the poor to study their problems. Both in Britain and America declared Dr. Collier, nearly a third of the illness is caused by mental worry, the chief cause of which is fear for security of jobs. “Job security,” he said, "came up in discussions again and again. The question is a living and urgent problem and is the direct cause of a lot of ill-health. ’ Dr Collier expressed the view that the rise of pools and lotteries in England was largely due to a feeling of insecurity among working people with regard to their jobs. He divided job insecurity into three types —disorderly technical changes within industry when men were thrown out of work by the introduction of new machines and not reabsorbed in the work; the freedom of the employer to sack men; and loss of employment through old age or disability. "The problem,” he said, "must be tackled consecutively along each of these three lines.”