RELIEF WORKS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 February 1939, Page 5

RELIEF WORKS

DEPARTMENT TO REPORT ON ALL JOBS SMALL NUMBER OF MEN LOAFING. STATEMENT BY MINISTER OF LABOUR. (By Te'eßraph—Press Association.) AUCKLAND, February 23. To ensure that the men engaged under the Government’s Employment Promotion Fund are giving satisfactory service, officers of the Department of Labour are to visit all jobs throughout the Dominion and prepare reports, according to an announcement by the Minister of Labour, Mr Webb. The Minister said that any men not proving satisfactory would receive no further payments from the fund. He hoped to receive the reports in time to present them to the Government when it was dealing with the future employment of those men not absorbed into private enterprise and other work by the time the Social Security Act came into force.

“The great bulk of the men employed on Scheme 13 jobs are working as hard and efficiently as any other section of the community and creating many assets, such as roads, park, recreation grounds, and sXvimming baths, and practically every town in New Zealand is benefiting from their efforts. There is much more of this useful work waiting to be carried out, and the men can rest assured that if they cannot be absorbed into industry after March 31, the Government will .see that work is provided. “Unfortunately a small number of these men participating at standard rates of pay are not playing the game. They consider themselves privileged to loaf and are deliberately doing it. It is also to be regretted that a number of employing authorities’have utilised relief labour to do work that would ordinarily have been done had; the„ relief scheme not been in operation.