Keeping a check [Control and distribution of Labour]

The third class of problem is concerned, as has been said already, with the control and distribution of the available labour. We could not hope to build our war machine in pre-war conditions of employment. Thus, in the early days of rearmament, firms with war contracts spent much time and money “poaching” skilled labour. Tempting offers would be made to experienced men, whose value was soaring to exchange jobs and employers.

This growing evil brought into existence the Restriction on Engagement Order which ensured that all engagements in the engineering, electrical installation, and building and civil engineering industries should be made through the Employment Exchange machinery of Ministry. It also ensured that agricultural workers and coalminers should not be employed outside those vital industries. Subsequently all men in the age classes 41 to 50 inclusive were registered under the Registration of employment Order to pick up the men not engaged on important war work. Again, men with special type of skill, such as engineers, electricians, shipbuilders, miners and seamen registered at different times so that those of them employed in less essential industries could be transferred to the war industries where their services are urgently needed.

In the summer of 1940, for example, the Ministry set all its machinery in motion to discover all the men who had been formerly employed in the shipyards. During the last war, all the yards were working at high pressure, but after the war there came a slump, and many shipyards were closed down.

In towns like Jarrow, grass grew in the yards, highly skilled men were thrown out of work, with no prospects of ever returning to their trades, and the whole life of the place began to wither and decay. After years of heart-breaking unemployment, large numbers of skilled men drifted away to other places, and sooner or later found other jobs of a kind – perhaps helping in a garage or bicycle shop, serving beer or weighing out potatoes, stoking furnaces, action as porters or caretakers in blocks of flats.

Now these men had to be found. They may not have eyes on a shipyard for years, but the skill acquired during years of apprenticeship had been entirely forgotten. So back they came to the yards, middle-aged men now, feeling stiff and rusty, to begin building ships again for Britain that had once allowed them to be thrown on the scrap-heap. They are helping to build the ships for us now, earning good money and using their old skill.

Another example of this elaborate machinery of registration at work can be seen in the rapid creation of our war wireless services, especially those concerned with radiolocation.

In the early autumn of 1940, radiolocation, with which the Air Ministry had been experimenting for some years, suddenly made rapid strides. Now it was urgently necessary that trained people should be found for this and other electrical services. The Ministry’s Central (Technical and Scientific)

 Register and its general labour supply organization were at once placed at the disposal of Lord Hankey, who had undertaken the task of finding thousands of people for these services. The Forces, the universities, technical colleges and schools, the B.B.C., the Post Office, and the radio industry, were combed and re-combed for men and women with the necessary knowledge and experience, and courses of instruction on the essential subjects were organised. These wireless services, now of immense size and complexity, have received greater numbers of recruits from the small radio shops everywhere. It is the Little Man of the radio industry, the man who first opened his modest shop because he enjoyed taking sets to pieces and putting a valve in here and a coil there, who is helping now with radiolocation, shutting up shop to pluck death out of the skies.

Incidentally, Lord Hankey can be quoted here on the present value and future scope of one form of registration:

  "The Ministry set up a new Appointments Department of which the Central (Technical and Scientific) Register now forms part. There are now Appointments Offices all over the country dealing with the war-time use of many kind of professional and managerial people who do not fall to the Central Register. These should prove very useful after the war when thousands of men and women will be changing over to peace-time employment.  In addition, the Central (Technical and Scientific) Register should be maintained, through possibly with a revised scope".

In other words of Sir Lawrence Bragg, F.R.S.: “The working of the Central Register has been so interesting that one would like to see a permanent body with the same functions set up after the war…”  Such proposals open up visions of an Imperial Department under the Ministry of Labour and National Service linked with the Dominions and India for purposes of interchange, and furnishing scientists and engineers for home research, industry , the Fighting Services, Colonies, and foreign countries when required…

From which it may be seen that one small chapter of our manpower story could easily be developed into whole volumes, and that what is twinkle in the back-out of to-day might grow, in a planned peace, into a steady illumination lighting giant high ways of progress.

Both the Restriction on Engagement Order and the special registration, mentioned above, were part of a short-term policy. They belonged to the great improvisations of 1940. But it became obvious early in 1941 that a long-term policy would be needed. The growing massive structure of our war industries demanded something more than these improvisations. The supply of labour in these industries would have to be as steady and secure as possible. We could no longer afford the chances and changes of peacetime employment. Every loss in man-hours was now a hole in our armour.

So there came into being the Essential Work Order, the boldest and probably the most famous of all our manpower regulations.

This was by scheduling essential undertakings and drastically restricting an employer’s freedom to discharge a man and an employee’s freedom to leave his employment.

No more casual sacking or giving notice. Except in instances of “serious misconduct,” each side had now to give a week’s notice and obtain the permission of the National Service Officer. Both the employer and the worker were given the right of appeal to a Local Appeal Board against the decision of the National Service Officer. (The Essential Work Order also deals with the terms and conditions of work, but we shall return to that in a later section.)

Furthermore, the Order tries to face squarely what could be considered the new sin in industry, namely, absenteeism. The Order makes it an offence for a worker to stay away from essential war work without good reason, but before any official action can be taken in an individual case, it has to be considered in the first instance by the appropriate Joint Committee in the works.

The Committee may deal with the case themselves by warning the worker or they may recommend that he should be given an official warning by National Service Officer. In the last resort the absentee can be prosecuted and punished by the courts, but this is rarely necessary. As a rule the influence of fellow workers, brought to bear through the Joint Committee, is effective.

     NEXT SECTION

    BACK TO MANPOWER INDEX