"TOUTING"

Stratford Evening Post, Issue 84, 20 November 1928, Page 8

"TOUTING"

THE PERSONAL TOUCH WOMAN ENVOY OF EMPIRE. The announcement made recently that Miss Cox, of the Leeds Employment Committee,'has been directed by the Ministry of Labour to proceed to Australia to investigate the conditions and opportunities for Women workers there reveals an interesting and littleknown branch of the Ministry's work "Which has been making silent progress for some time, says the Morning Post. On the face of it, with Agents-general in London and frequent Government missions visiting the dominions and colonies at considerable cost to the public purse, this visit might appeal' to be redundant. Inquiry, however, disproves this view. In conversation with an official of the Ministry of Labour, I learned the truth of the matter. Official visits, heralded by brass bands, and with red carpets and officials in cocked hats as inevitable concomitants, are perhaps useful in matters of high policy, but when it comes to Hie real job of finding work for England's unemployed, a simple man or woman going among the people interested personally in the question and acting in much the same way as a commercial traveller proves the most valuable type of emissary. That, in effect, was the official's explanation. "After all," he said, "we are a business concern," and must fouls for our business. You don't send your board of directors out for that — neither do we. There is bound to be 'window-dressing' for the benefit of widely-advertised official tours, and in such cases only an unusually keen observer can see into things. /"On the other hand, a single observer, with narrow and definite terms of reference and of the same standing and on the same salary as the officials who really know about things, who can talk on equal and unofficial terms with people, finds out what we want to know and places the individual for us. The politicians can now sow the seed of the idea, but they cannot find the actual job for the actual man."

In Canada, for instance, he said, a similar investigator had found that .conditions were radically different from those, painted in certain official reports. There, was a big latent desire for men which had never really been translated. Farmers were naturally loath to give definite orders for men six months ahead, through official and somewhat awe-inspiring channels, but they would tell a traveller what they thought they would want. This had proved of great assistance to tlii. -Ministry, which had in this way placpd many hundreds of men who would never have otherwise left England. A novel feature of the work of these "commercial travellers in manpower" is their use of the portable kincma camera for propaganda work at Home. I saw one such film at the Ministry taken by an official who had just returned from Canada. It depicts the daily life of lads who have migrated, and it will be shown in various mining areas from which the ' boys were drawn. Thus lads up in Durham will see their friends as they are now, smiling, and well fed, and'will be able to ask questions as to their wages and conditions. The sub-titles are nearly all personal: "Here is Johnnie Williams,working with an earth crusher. He has his own dog Jim with him," and that sort of thing. This has, of course, proved many times as efficacious as the distribution of heavy statistical literature, or talks about the might of Empire. The boys may read the former and listen to the latter with polite boredom, but for every single boy who has been induced to give up the profession of unemployment for a colonial life by these means, Johnnie and his dog have persuaded a hundred. The personal touch counts for a great deal in this problem of overseas settlement, and the psychology of the Ministry, of Labour in this respect Seems to be both sound and practical.