Family Wage Scheme in Belgium

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 27, 12 July 1923, Page 35

Family Wage Scheme in Belgium

A very interesting scheme is being tried out in Belgium, 0 which more may be heard soon outside. This is a scheme designed to allow workmen with large families to .face the rising cost of living. Several groups of employers have agreed to pay family allowances to men or women with children under 14, or those who have aged or infirm relations dependent on them. The quarry owners near Tournai started the scheme last September! They subscribed to a fund from which each of their employees receive 50 centimes a day for the first or second child (or infirm person) supported, 75 centimes for the third, and a franc a day for every other dependent. Other funds, more or less similar have been started elsewhere. Liege has a fund from which workmen will draw a benefit in regard to their families, after having worked for at least three months for the same firm. A strike without notice is considered as terminating the engagement. But a man out of work not through his own fault is to draw the usual family allowance. The arrangement seems admirable, for it is so worked that a careless worker has no chance to appropriate this family allowance to himself. Each firm pays this dependents' allowance to the dependents themselves. A postal order for the amount is sent either to the mother or whoever has the actual care of the children. Nor have these allowances anything to do with wages; they do not figure on the pay sheets,°and they are kept in a separate ledger account which is checked once a month. As might perhaps have bee nexpected, the Socialist Trades Unions look askance at the scheme, which they profess to view as a means of dodging a rise in wages. Their special contempt is, however, reserved to the clause which stops the allowances in the event of a sudden and unauthorised strike. On the other hand, the Catholic Trades Unions favor the scheme. The only apparent criticism from this quarter being that the-wages of every.man ought to be sufficient to support a family of five, and that the family allowance ought to begin after the family exceeds five members.