The Evening Star. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1926. THE UNWANTED APPRENTICE.

Evening Star, Issue 19410, 19 November 1926, Page 6

The Evening Star. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1926. THE UNWANTED APPRENTICE.

Rotaey has lit on an important question, that of tho avocations open to the boys of New Zealand. In about a month the school year ends and a number of lads will begin to face life in earnest ss soon as the New Year holidays are over. ' They will soon learn that the outside world is full of anomalies. They may possibly have heard of the need for more production to enable the country to pay its way. Naturally they would conclude that if there is to be more production, more producers will be needed and welcomed. Then comes the first disillusionment. If they wish to go on the land they discover, unless their circumstances are exceptionally favorable by reason of parental “pull,” that primary producers all seem to be agreed that wages are too high for expansion, and that if more people are to find their employment on the land this expense must be reduced. Therefore the tendency is to seek more remunerative employment elsewhere. It is not a large proportion who can afford to wait years before earning power is developed by study for a profession; it is not a large proportion whom commercial pursuits can absorb or who would find them congenial or within the compass of their intelligence. Not many lads with real foresight will deliberately elect to become units in the unskilled labor market. Both tradition and acquaintance with the social and economic system naturally suggest the learning of a trade. But in. these days the learning of a trade presents increasing difficulties. One of the main channels along which young life should run is becoming choked, and the need for attention to it is pressing. There exist boys’ committees in the rotary clubs in the dominion. These are being invited to do some cleaning out, to investigate why it is that apprenticeship is languishing. The Registrar of Apprentices has addressed the Wellington Rotary Club on the failure of the machinery embodied in the Apprentices Act for the facilitation of the transition from school to employment. The Labor Department first of all gets into touch with head masters and parents and then with prospective employers. But, according to Mr Rowley, the employers are indifferent. They will not provide openings in their works, and decline to employ , anything like the number of apprentices in proportion to journeymen which the Arbitration Court has declared permissible. It may be a short-sighted policy on the part of the employers, because ultimately it must restrict their choice in the manning of their works and give tho employees the advantages arising from demand in excess of supply of their commodity, their skilled labor. But it is futile for the Labor Department to blame employers, since it is the operation of the law which the department seeks to administer which has contributed to this apathy on the employers’ part in the training of recruits for their industries. The employers complain that the responsibilities required of thein in. the matter of apprentices are harassing and irksome and the rates of pay fixed by the Arbitration Court are uneconomic.

This deadlock threatened some years ago. With a view to its being overcome legislation was passed which aimed at the establishing of apprenticeship committees, joint bodies representative of workers and employers. But those committees have not functioned as was hoped by those who proposed them. This is indisputable as far as Dunedin is concerned. Complaints of a similar failure have come from Auckland. Since the speech of the Registrar of Apprentices in Wellington, a defence of the Apprentices Act has come from Mr Sutcliffe, of Christchurch. Mr Sutcliffe is a carpenters’ union secretary, and is a member of an apprentices committee. Ho does not claim that the Apprentices Act is a success. He takes the more easily defended second-line position that it should be given a longer trial before being condemned. The position in the carpentering trade is that labor is in under-supply, and there is often a considerable margin between the minimum award wage and the rates actually paid. Mr Sutcliffe shows concern lest there should be disturbance of the status quo. His conception of the apprentice ‘problem is therefore very restricted in outlook. As he puts it: “The success or otherwise of the Apprentices Act, in my opinion, lies in this feature—that the employers’ and workers’ sections of the committees will have to work together to endeavor not, perhaps, to produce more tradesmen, but to produce more efficient tradesmen. If this becomes the ultimate effect of the Apprentices Act it will have done good work.” But this is of no help to the boys who want to learn trades and can get no opening. To them, and to their parents and their schoolmasters, it will appear like a negation of the principle of the “ right to work,” of which Labor adjuncts to unemployed deputations are solid adherents on those particular occasions.