Idlers and the Dole A serious flaw in our social
system has for some time been exercising the minds of everyone connected with the administration of unemployment assistance, and Mr. Ronald Davison, in a letter to The Times, very usefully emphasises the need for prompt action. Unemployment assistance allowances, of course, are drawn by persons who have exhausted their covenanted insurance benefit, or for some reason have never been insured. In the vast majority of cases the money is urgently needed and wisely spent. But there exists, as every social worker knows, a class of young men between 20 and 3o who, being unmarried, can quite well live on the 25s. or so which they -draw, make no serious effort to obtain work at all, and flatly refuse to attend the training courses under the auspices of the Minister of Labour. They frankly prefer loafing, varied by a few odd jobs to supplement the unemployment assistance dole, and they are rapidly making themselves unemployable as well as unemployed. This is plainly a case in which the doctrine, no work, no dole, should be laid down. Work-centres could be set up at no great cost in the principal cities where this evil exists, and the unemployment assistance money paid, and paid only, to men who have done a week's work at such a centre. That broad principle could be varied considerably in its application ; every facility would, of course, be given to a man to seek genuine work. But it is a prostitution of a relief system to let it be used to support deliberate idleness.
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