Prolonged unemployment is always in
itself demoralising. But, given that a man is unemployed, it will not
demoralise him more that he should receive adequate relief rather than
inadequate relief or no relief at all. On the contrary, on balance, it
will, I believe, demoralise him less. For nothing so unfits a man for
work as that he should go half-starved, or lack the means to maintain
the elementary decencies of life.
But there are other considerations which you have to take into account.
If you get a situation such that the man who loses his job becomes
thereby much better-off than the man who remains at work, I do not say
that the former man will necessarily be demoralised, but I do say that
the latter man will become disgruntled. I do not want to put that
consideration too high. At the present time there are many such
anomalies; in a great many occupations, the wages that the men at work
are receiving amount to much less than the money they would obtain if
they lost their jobs and were labelled unemployed.
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