BRITAIN'S UNEMPLOYED

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 23, 27 January 1940, Page 13

BRITAIN'S UNEMPLOYED

CLOSER ANALYSIS

FAR MORE PROMISING

PICTURE

(British Official Wireless.)

(Received January 27, II a.m.)

RUGBY, January 26.

Practical interpretation of the Ministry of Labour's unemployment figures clearly reveals a far more promising picture than was suggested by (the recent statement to the effect that in December, after three months of war, 1,360,000 persons were still without work. The "Daily Telegraph" points out that a.large number of these 1,360,000 were only unemployed in the sense that they were moving from one job to another. Economists agree that some such mobile body of labour, is inevitable under any economic system where freedom of movement is granted to labour. The Ministry of Labour estimates that this. body of mobile labour will now be some half a million, which is a smaller percentage of the total employed than is usually accepted. A further 200,000, it is estimated, fall into the categories of unemployable or not immediately employable, either through age or locality. Thus the real figure of Britain's labour reserve today— those who could be put into jobs if jobs, were available—is not 1,360,000 but some 660,000.

In this connection it is interesting to recall that during the last war, when armament and every form " of industrial production was at its height, and when all the available man power had been mobilised in the fighting forces, the accepted number of unemployed—no., register was then kept —was half a million. On the positive side of the present-day industrial picture there are a million more persons employed in Brit&in than twelve months ago. In addition, one of labour's most intractable problems, the so-called hard core of unemployment, comprising persons who have been out of work for twelve months or more and have thus often lost to a varying degree their immediate capacity for work, have been reduced between February and December, 1939, from 288,000 to 156,000.