The Pittsburgh Press (September 6, 1946)
One vet out of eight belongs to 52-20 jobless pay club
WASHINGTON (UP) – One veteran out of very eight today receives the $20-a-week-for-52 weeks GI jobless pay.
The Retraining and Re-employment Administration, whose task it is to coordinate efforts to refit and reinstate discharged servicemen in civilian life, blames that relatively high ratio on the inability of veterans to find suitable jobs and their unwillingness to look for work at this time.
This month marks the second anniversary of the 52-20 program. The number of veterans receiving the unemployment payments – approximately 1,800,000 – is pretty close to a peak.
What is worrying Maj. Gen. Graves B. Erskine, a soft-spoken, combat-toughened veteran Marine commander, is that the figure has remained pretty steadily at that level since last March.
Approximately 4,900,000 veterans have received one or more GI unemployment payments since the program was initiated in September 1944. This, it was estimated, is approximately 40 percent of all the veterans discharged to date. The unemployment compensation program alone, one of many providing benefits for former servicemen, cost $1,060,557,036 up to August 1.
More than 43,000 veterans have already exhausted their full 52 weeks of benefit payments. This figure appears relatively small when compared with the total number that has been on the rolls since the compensation program started. But Gen. Erskine is worried that this figure will rise sharply during the coming months. It’s not that he feels veterans are not entitled to the full benefits, but he fears the consequences of prolonged layoffs to men who could get jobs but won’t.
He believes veterans should consider the weekly allowances as a form of insurance – something to tide them over until they can get jobs.
Men who prefer to remain on the compensation rolls, he says, are losing seniority and valuable job experience. They’re losing opportunity to build up Social Security credits. And Gen. Erskine fears that they may become a group of “dissatisfied, disillusioned ‘floaters’ and ‘loafers.’”
The returns for July are only now being studied. But an analysis showed that 38.4 percent of all new claims for compensation filed in June were from veterans who had been on the rolls, then left to take employment and returned. Indications are, officials said, that this trend is increasing steadily.