LESS UNEMPLOYMENT

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 83, 7 April 1936, Page 13

LESS UNEMPLOYMENT

ENGLAND PROSPEROUS

LACK OF SKILLED LABOUR

A confident England, with unemployment cut down to a healthy' margin, and workers who are unperturbed by European crises, was the picture drawn to a "Post" reporter yesterday afternoon by Captain Leslie Gamage, exports director of the General Electric Company of London, who is on a business visit to the Dominion.

"So far as unemployment is concerned, England is extraordinarily prosperous," remarked Captain Gamage, "unemployment being limited mainly to two industries—coal and cotton. My own company is now employing some 35,000 people, as compared, with 28,000 about eighteen months ago; in fact, we are now having great difficulty in getting skilled labour. We were bringing skilled labour from Newcastle to Birmingham." This lack of skilled workers was attributable only in part to the decrease in the number of apprentices taken into training during the depression, Captain Gamage continued. Apprenticeship was limited by agreement with trades unions, a ratio between the number of apprentices and fully qualified workers being observed. The depression, of course, meant that a relatively smaller number of apprentices was employed and today there was naturally a lack of qualified men. "The shortage is, in my opinion, partly due to the slump but mainly to the free trade policy of the country, now abandoned. There was not sufficient inducement to men to put their sons into skilled engineering professions. That is now remedied, but it will .take a long time to make up the time that has been lost. ,

"We in England are full of confidence, and we feel that we have taken our place as leaders of the world again; in spite of troubles in, Europe we are full of optimism. As regards the European trouble the average Englishman takes his usual stolid outlook and refuses to be panicked. In fact, I understand that when the French delegation arrived in London they were somewhat annoyed to see newspaper posters devoted to results of football matches and the like, whereas their own placards were occupied with "La

Crise."