PLACEMENT SERVICE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 29, 4 February 1937, Page 7

PLACEMENT SERVICE

ITS HUMAN SIDE

NOT MERELY MATHEMATICAL

In reply to letters criticising the work done by the Placement Service, the following statement was made to "The Post" today by the Controller of Employment:—

Amongst the million and a half of New Zealand's population two newspaper correspondents have endeavoured to discount the amazing success of the State Placement Service. Their principle appears to be that any successful Government enterprise is necessarily suspect, and in view of this the following information is supplied so that readers may gauge the position for themselves. To begin with, published figures show: The number of men receiving rationed relief work as at January 18, 1937, was 7874, and the number on sustenance was 20,708 —a total of 28,582. These are the only men who can rightly be described as unemployed. On the same date the men registered but not eligible for relief totalled 2834, and there were also 6404 men receiving full-time subsidised employment at the standard Public Works Department rate of wages or at the award rate, if that was higher. These latter men are engaged under normal conditions, and are thus no longer strictly relief workers, though for administrative purposes their names are not removed from the reg.sU-r. This explanation should be acceptable to the correspondents who contended that the actual unemployed total was 40,000. The official statement, however, includes the figures for non-eligibles and for men employed on full time, the gross total amounting to 37,820. This is a decrease of 1252 on the total for the previous four-weekly period, and of 18,(382 on the total for January, 1936. WHAT THE RECOKDS SHOW. Now, as to the Placement Service weekly bulletin of placements: it may surprise the correspondents to learn that the provision of employment for disengaged men has for very many years been a function of the Labour Department, though it has not been prosecuted as aggressively as have the Placement Service efforts to find vacant positions and suitable men to fill them. The results of this renewed vigour on behalf of men who had not the facilities for investigating that a Government Department necessarily possesses naturally were tabulated each week, and the newspapersl of the Dominion, recognising the news value of a statement of . such human interest, regularly inserted it, leaving the figures to carry their own message. Tne organisers of the service have never in any public or private utterance claimed that it is anything other than a systematised method of placing men in employment. In oflicial statements the fact that the revival of industry had materially assisted placement officers in their work has been mentioned as a matter of course. This aid, however, cannot in the slightest degree affect, the claim that but for the introduction of the service thousands of men now profitably employed would most probably have remained on the relief registers or been absorbed in occupations for which they were quite unfitted. FITTING MEN TO JOBS. The service records contain details of the sifting process that resulted in the transfer of these men, most of them wearied physically and mentally in their personal fruitless ' search for work over a period of years. This test of the value of the service is beyond question; and it is to this outstanding achievement of directing into their proper industrial channels these large numbers of unemployed men that credit is due but has never been claimed. Information has, it is true, been given to the Press from time to time concerning remarkable discoveries, after Dominion-wide searches, of men with special qualities of artisanship but hiding.their talents in humble circumstances because they had no means of advertising their worth! The newspapers have also been supplied with details of the placement of the lame, the halt, the deformed, the deaf and dumb, and the partly blind men whose economic value to employers was generally regarded as nil, in remunerative positions in which they are continuing to i give satisfaction. Will the correspondents claim that these men would ordinarily have found suitable work if the placement officers' representations had not aided them? Will they also, in their desire to reduce to mathematics an agency that is designed to function as an aid in human rehabilitation, contend that the extensive list of men from 60 to 70 years of age—pensioners mostly, and in the industrial discard —for whom work has been found would automatically have secured employment if the employers had not been, approached on their behalf? • The correspondents will find it difficult to believe that the weekly, figures have frequently been increased by the placement of men in vacancies that employers themselves did not consider existed or would occur in the future. They were induced to take men on in the belief that their services would soon" be required, and almost invariably they were. ' One very prominent employer of labour relates: "We really didn't need another hand; bur staff seemed to be almost too big, but the placement officer assured me that his candidate was an exceptionally good man, so I f^ll for it." The good man is now at the top of the clerical salary list, despite a particularly serious physical disability. Perhaps the correspondents will now realise that there is in the Placement Service an angle they have overlooked, namely, that of the industrial, social service, and human viewpoint, as opposed to the purely numerical computation of its worth. INVESTIGATORS PRAISE. The Hon. H. J. 1, Hyland, M.L.A., Assistant Minister of Agriculture and Secretary to the Cabinet of the State of Victoria, Australia, and in addition Assistant Minister to four other Ministers, in addressing the New Zealand Government at a recent public function, used the following words: "Your Placement Service is absolutely outstanding. You are tackling the problem of getting men back to work in an "admirable way. The system is absolutely marvellous. There is no talk, there is no thought of charity. The sole aim is to get jobs for idle men. The men are spoken to as men. ... It would be a wonderful thing if Australia would adopt the same system. It is the one thing I can take back to Victoria as an outstanding New Zealand achievement. I compliment the Government and its placement officers on the wonderful job they are doing." The New Zealand public may act in the role of jury and reach its own conclusion.