Wisconsin First

What Labor and Liberals have been preaching for years became an actuality in Wisconsin last week. Passed after a two-month legislative wrangle, during which one Senator challenged another to a "duel" with boxing gloves, was a bill to provide statewide unemployment insurance. Wisconsin was the first State in the Union to enact such a measure.

The plan compels every employer of ten or more men to set aside 2% of his payroll until a fund is accrued equalling $75 per eligible worker. Ineligible are workers earning more than $1,500 per year. When an employe is laid off for reasons other than his own, a trade dispute or an act of God, he may draw up to $10 per week for a maximum of ten weeks. The plan may operate voluntarily if 175,000 workers are placed within its scope before June 1, 1933.

The bill, pushed by Governor Philip La Follette (who cut his own salary from $7,500 to $6,000 last week), was passed simultaneously with measures which doubled the State income tax rate, abolished deductions for capital losses from incomes, levied more taxation on chain stores, placed an emergency tax on corporation dividends. The result, about half of what "Young Phil" had hoped for, makes available $7,000,000 for Unemployment Relief in Wisconsin.

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