Nelgptt f-nrnwg ifflatl FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1945 THE LABOUR MARKET

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 30 November 1945, Page 4

Nelgptt f-nrnwg ifflatl FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1945 THE LABOUR MARKET

JUDGING by newspaper advertisements throughout New Zealand and other indexes, the demand for labour of many kinds exceeds the supply, Keen competition, especially for skilled and juvenile employees, is at present the rule and when manpower controls are fully relaxed, as they are expected to be by the end of March next, that competition may b e intensified. How far is this gap between supply and demand, which has widened as the war lengthened, a symptom of an economy deranged by war and how far may its characteristics be considered permanent? Opinions on what weight should be allocated to each of these two factors vary. Coloured by the knowledge that the demand-supply equation in the labour market is normally the other way round, the majority view is that the present employment condition in New Zealand is transitory, along with the circumstances which gave rise to it, and that when our post-war economy settles down, the trend will be towards labour surpluses, even to the extreme point of there being unemployment reminiscent of the evil depression years. Such a gloomy possibility is apparently in the Government’s mind when it so consistently baulks at opening up fresh sources of labour supply through immigration. Whether these presentiments will prove unwelcome realities depends in great measure on how we gear our post-war economic machine. The gradual change-over from war to peace will slacken some phases of its momentum and speed up others, but one of the disabilities which would prevent its running fairly evenly at its newly-acquired pace could well be lack of an adequate labour force to feed it. In other words, stagnation —which leads to depression—could be caused by having too little labour available as well as by having too much. Apart from the service personnel now being absorbed back into peacetime avocations the labour pool is fed principally from below, that is, from the young people coming on. The findings of a survey carried out in this field recently, and published in the New Zealand Vocational Guidance bulletin, show that th e amount of juvenile labour available in New Zealand has actually decreased.

Here we have melancholy evidence of the way the steady fall in the birth rate between 1920 and 1935 is now impinging on industry. Since 1938 there has been a decline of 6.25 per cent, in the numbers in the 14-18 ag e group. This decline, the survey estimates, will continue until 1950, when the juvenile population will be smaller than it was in 1938. After 1950 there will be a slight increase in our juvenile population, followed by a more rapid increase in 1954, provided present trends continue. The second accentuating factor—one which has outweighing compensations unfortunately missing from the first —is the official raising of the school age, so that children do not now £ome on

to the labour market so young as they used to. In contrast with this shrunken supply the total demand for juvenile labour has increased because our industrial structure has expanded. Net result in the juvenile field: a bigger gap which will be much harder to fill. Not until 1955 will the supply of young people for industry have returned to the 1938 level. Babies born between now and then will have no effect on that estimate. The only way of'revising it upwards would be to open a channel for juvenile labour supply from outside New Zealand.