Foreign Labour for Britain

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25135, 17 March 1947, Page 6

Foreign Labour for Britain

When Britain’s Minister of Labour announced the Government’s intention to import as many displaced persons and other foreign workers as it could, “ The Times ” commented that the policy would be tested by performance. Three messages within the last few days have emphasised that the test is yet to be made. On Wednesday, the President of the Board of Trade spoke in the House of Commons of his hope that 278,000 more workers, among them 100,000 foreigners, would be available by the end of the year; on Saturday, Reuter’s correspondent in Herford reported that three officials of the Ministry of Labour had arrived in the British zone to arrange the transfer of 12,000 displaced persons a month from Germany to work in Britain; and this morning’s account of the agreement for a five-day week in Britain’s mines mentions that the Miners’ Union delegates undertook to accept displaced persons for work in the pits on the same terms as Poles. Each message, of course, offers only a promise that Britain’s labour shortage will be relieved. Sir Stafford Cripps, for instance, commits himself to nothing more than a “hope”. Again, the Labour Ministry officials had something to say of the type of worker they would choose and of working conditions and accommodation, but nothing of when the tide would begin to flow. The miners’ undertaking, too, is an assurance that may or may not be worth having. In January the executive committee of their national union agreed at long last to accept Polish labour for the pits. It made', however, three stipulations, most notably that the local branch or lodge must agree also; and a month later, in the Commons debate on the Polish Resettlement Bill, Mr Richard Law was able to say, without being challenged, that though 900 experienced Polish miners were said to have been available for months, only one had by then gone to work. The same stipulation, too, was made last August by the foundry trade union when it allowed itself to be persuaded by the Government and the employers to agree that Italian workers might be brought in. The agreement provided that no firm should employ Italians—it was pro-

posed to bring in 2800 of them, or about one-tenth of the minimum number of extra workers needed—without the consent of its workers. That consent, said the “Manchester “Guardian” early in January, had not been given. Nor had it been f iven when the “ Financial Times ”, five weeks ago, discussed the problems of importing foreign labour; and if it has been given since, the cables have said nothing of it.