Evening star., 1932-09-04
Spreading Relief Thinly.

| SpreAQluS hellel 4ulHly'
The conference with the Commission
ers on Tuesday. requested by the Execu-
tive Committee of the Monday Evening
Club, should produce interesting dis
cussions Of policy in connection with
administration of public relief next
Winter. While the occasion for the
conference Is the decision of municipal
authorities to cut expenditures of the
emergency relief fund by forty per cent,
this cut involving reduction from thirty
five to twenty-five cents an hour to be
paid to day laborers for made work," !"
those whom the Monday Evening Club
represents do not come so much in the
spirit of protest over the reduction as
they do in the belief that some of the
controversial elements of relief admin
istration should be talked over and de-
cided
The problem faced by the municipal
fly in It's expenditure of the s35o,oo0 re-
lief fund-of which some $4,000 al
ready has been spent-might be con-
strued as one Of simple arithmetic.
There is a certain sum available for
this relief work. There is an estab-
lished demand for the relief The sum
cannot at this time be increased and
the demand for relief cannot be de-
creased. The only method of making
the money last is to spread 1t more
thinly. That is the fundamental idea
behind the proposed forty per cent cut
in the present scale Of relief.
It is, Of course, distressing to realize
what this means. It Is equally distress
ing to face the fact that weekly allow
ances for families in some cities are re-
ported to have fallen as low as $2.39,
with rate Of IS a week considered
high 1t is dificult to believe that some
cities are actually feeding men, women
and children at cost Of six and half
cents day. And it is matter of gen.
eral concern, or should be, that the
proposed reduction from thirty-flve to
twenty-five cents an hour for made
work" means that the man who has
been given work that brings him 81 a
week viii receive only S. week
But II the relief fund cannot be in
creased, what else is there to do?
One suggestion is the abandonment
of the made work" expedient alto
gether and the adoption of the plan
of budgeting relief on minimum needs
and supplying 1t in the form of cash
for food or rent. This suggestion Is
advanced, by those who favor it, as
escaping the complications attending
efforts to fix wage scales. The pre-
vailing wage scale for common labor
on Government contract work in the
District is now recognized as As cents
an hour. It has been maintained that
private employers can obtain common
day labor Of the same sort for rs
cents an hour. II relief in the form
Of made work" is paid for at the rate
of IS cents an hour, the common
laborer will be tempted to quit his job
to get The higher rate available as a
form of charity.
Or, putting it another way, If the
municipality must pay the prevailing
scale of wages for municipal work that
must be done. and that prevailing scale
is IS cents an hour. how can the
municipalities an agency dispensing
public f,1nds-consistently pay rate Of
IS or as cents an hour by getting the
work done in the name of charity?
Anacostia Park was cleaned up after
the bonus n1archers left by constituting
the Job as an opportunity for made
work" Other work in the parks has
been so construed. And when the
lower scale is paid, the effect, while
apparently saving the taxpayers money
and giving somebody a job, in reality
decreases the opportunity of regular
employment, lowers the standard Of
pay and therefore the standard of liv-
ing. and, in the end, these things react
adversely on the community as a
whole.
The basic idea of the spread work
movement is to enlist the aid of each
employer in giving jobs to his own
people, some of whom otherwise would
have no work. The steel industry has
kept relatively high number of steel
men at work, despite low production
The spread work" idea is not to beat
down wage scales. That would be dis.
astrous, regardless of whether the at
tempt was deliberate. and of course
there is no thought of deliberately
beating down wages in the effort tc
make relief funds last by reducing pay
for made work"
On the other hand once the idea
of made work" is wholly abandoned
the question Of the dole and all that the
term implies is raised And these are
the matters that will be discussed
Tuesday, along with other problems o.
how thinly the butter Of relief can bt
spread this Winter in Washington.