F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCK AND STATISTICS. 131 



To-day things are different. Successful resistance to a reduction may 

 still involve unemployment, but unemployment does not involve the 

 same certainty or degree of distress. Before the war the provision for 

 unemployment relief was partial and inadequate. To-day there is a 

 system of unemployment relief that covers all the industries that are 

 liable to serious unemployment. Then the spokesmen of the wage- 

 earners had to consider the employment situation, because their clients 

 would be the chief sufferers, if their wage-policy restricted employment ; 

 now, in such a case, they may nevertheless persist in their policy, since 

 they are conscious that their clients are not without resources, if all 

 cannot be employed at the level of wages exacted. 



It is not that unemployment relief leads to the refusal of available 

 work ; the Employment Exchanges provide an adequate check on that 

 abuse, were there any general inclination towards it. Nor does the relief, 

 as it is administered, impose any insuperable check upon mobility between 

 district and district or trade and trade. The Courts of Referees and the 

 Umpire, who decide on doubtful claims to benefit and administer the 

 provision in the Acts that the applicant shall be ' genuinely seeking 

 work ' but unable to obtain ' suitable employment,' while they treat 

 each case on its merits, have in general put an interpretation upon 

 these terms, that requires the unemployed workman sooner or later to 

 accept work outside his own district or trade, if it is available. 



The effect of unemployment relief is indirect. It influences wage- 

 rates by disinclining the representatives of the wage-earners to take the 

 same account of unemployment as they did before relief was provided. 

 Two incidents of the scheme strengthen this tendency. In the first place 

 the unemployed are not an undisturbed mass of permanently unemployed 

 workpeople, but a body the composition and membership of which is 

 constantly changing. Hence a ten per cent, restriction of employment in 

 an industry does not involve the relegation to continuous idleness of 

 10 per cent, of the workers in the industry, but irregular employment 

 for perhaps 30 or 40 per cent. ; the evil of unemployment is diffused, 

 and there is a chance that intermittent employment at the higher rate 

 will bring in as much as regular employment at a lower rate. In the 

 second place the system of organised short-time makes it possible to 

 dove-tail periods of wage-earning with periods of unemployment relief. 

 Right to benefit under the unemployment insurance scheme does not 

 begin the moment a worker falls out of employment, but only when a 

 waiting period of a week has elapsed ; any three days of unemployment, 

 however, within six consecutive days or two unemployment periods of 

 at least three days each separated by a spell of not more than ten weeks' 

 work, are treated as continuous unemployment, and a second ' waiting 

 period ' is not required. Employers have adapted their engagement of 

 labour to these conditions, and thus spread the available employment 

 over a larger number of workers than the industry could employ full- 

 time, at the same time throwing on the unemployment insurance fund 

 the burden of maintaining the surplus labour when it is not in employ- 

 ment. Instituted as a device for tiding over a temporary depression, 

 this system has been prolonged as year succeeded year of unemploy- 

 ment, and has had the effect of substituting intermittent and irregular 



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