Welfare in age of wage slaves

THE column by Alison Park (Yorkshire Post, September 10) states that more than half of the people in Yorkshire and Humberside believe that unemployment benefits are too high and discourage people from working. I see things the other way around.

Unemployment benefits are calculated by government officials. The benefits paid are considered to be the minimum amount of money an individual or a family needs to maintain a basic lifestyle.

If these benefits are higher than one can earn by going out to work, then surely it must follow that the wages which are being offered by some employers are too low.

Many unskilled lower-paid workers are little more than wage slaves. No wonder so many of them drop out of the system and prefer to live off the minimum income provided by benefits.

What future for suffering Syria?

From: Peter Neil Taylor, Magnolia Close, Driffield.

WITH the possibility that the Assad regime will accept the use of an international control body to investigate the chemical warfare situation, does this mean that things might return back to normal for the population of Syria?

Normal being that the Assad regime and the so-called rebels might return to the “conventional fighting” which took place before the introduction of chemical warfare.

It would appear that in all of the meetings underway at the moment no mention is made as to how the overall situation can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion.

I’m sure that the tens of thousands of people presently residing in the refugee camps situated outside the Syrian border must be awaiting this important outcome with intense interest.