As a socialist who earns his w
ages by working for the National Assista Board, I read with interest the recent articles on the NAB, ey ar tae x am sorry that your first contributor had the misfortune to meet a living fossil from the means-test at his first contact with the Board. This species, I am happy to Say, is rapidly becoming extinct. The vast majority of NsA.B, staff try to approach their job with intelligence and understand~ ing; a task which is not eased by chronic overwork, low pay, and poor working conditions, The blame for the strain on staff and poor service to the public thus caused must be laid squarely on the adminstrative heads of the department, not on individual clerks, It is sufficient to say that N.A.B. staff are rapidly becoming the most militant section of organised civil servants. Margaret Croucher appears to miss the (socialist) point about the "wage stop". We can take it as axiomatic that no capitalist-based society will ever accept the principle that a worker should be better off on social benefits than when working. The appalling fact is that hundreds of thousands of workers are taking home pay which is below the subsistence level of the NAB. This of course is one of the basic contradictions of capitalism, and in terms of capitalist economics, inevitable. It is naive to expect the assistance Board to solve this question. Merging NAB with MPNI in a super ministry of Social Security will not solve the problems of workers who now have to apply to the Board. Certainly,™benefits-related-to-earnings" is an acceptable principleprovided the earnings are high enough. This indicates the correct socialist solution to this problem(as to many others), namely, a massive advance on the wages front, pending the establishment of a society where "to each according to his needs" is the invincible principle.