Difficulties For British Workers

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31230, 30 November 1966, Page 17

Difficulties For British Workers

(N.Z. Press Association —Copyright)

LONDON, November 29.

Beside the holly-edged advertisements for Christmas gifts and party food the stark word “poverty” is beginning to appear more and more in Britain’s newspapers and magazines, writes an Australian Associated Press correspondent.

And the country that only five years ago was told by political leaders: “You have never had it so good” learned this week that nearly one British household in five lives in poverty—below the minimum subsistence level.

The queues of jobless outside

the Labour exchange of the Midlands and the North threaten to stretch near the three-quarters of a million mark when the festivities of Christmas give way to the chill realities of the New Year.

The “squeeze” which has been turned on progressively by the Government for over two years, was followed by the “freeze,” clamped on dramatically by the Prime Minister in July this year. Wage Pauses

“Wage pauses” had been tried before by the Conservaties when in power, but coming on top of all the deflationary taxation, hire-purchase restrictions and other tighter money controls of the squeeze, the effect has been wide-scale unemployment, a cut in home building, and a sudden slowing of development investment.

Mr Wilson welcomed the opportunity to thin out overstaffed industries and redeploy skilled men. But the unemployed, today totalling more than half a million and rising fast, have so far proved too many for the re-deployment hopes of Mr Wilson.

The figure has been swelled by thousands of car workers thrown out of work temporarily by strikes in key departments.

Where the redundancies are permanent, firms have sacked first the older workers who had only a few years to go to retirement. Between Jobs

Younger workers, who the Government hope will retrain for jobs more essential to the export industries, are often reluctant to move their homes or to accept lower-paid jobs as permanent. Some members of the Labour Government are reported to be prepared for a continuing unemployment total of just over half a million, provided they are sure that most of them are only between jobs.

In the industrial Midlands only a year ago there were seven vacancies for every man or woman out of work.

Today there are twice as many people looking for work as there are vacancies.

Jobless Percentages

But in Birmingham the percentage of jobless is still less than 2 per cent, while it is nearly 3 per cent over the rest of the country and is 7 per cent in Northern Ireland, and nearly as high in parts of Scotland and other black spots on the industrial map. In the South-east of England, including London, unemployment is still not serious, and the “situations vacant” column still stretch over pages of the newspapers, but many are for office staff, shop girls and hotel staff There are few factory jobs.

The lists are much shorter in the North, and even in the Midlands most "jobs vacant” advertisements are for specialists. Pre-Christmas selling in the stores, seems unaffected by the the unemployment figures, but car salesrooms and household appliance shops are filled with models they cannot sell.