ABSTRACT

It is only rarely that an unemployed man receives sufficient from either the unemployment insurance scheme or the Unemployment Assistance Board to meet his minimum needs. It is therefore obvious that an unemployed man who neither possesses resources of his own, nor is financially assisted by some other person, is almost necessarily living in poverty. As regards unemployment insurance the official attitude to this state of affairs has always been that benefit was never designed to be sufficient to meet the whole needs of the unemployed person, nor, indeed, to be directly related to those needs, but was intended merely as compensation for loss of wages. A sample of long-period unemployed showed that in November 1936, as many as 30% of them were living below the R. F. George "poverty line", and 44% at a mere subsistence level.