Industrial Recruits

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 843, 11 December 1929, Page 8

Industrial Recruits

Few Jobs in Crowded Trades

HUNDREDS of boys are ready to leave school and take ui> jobs. But in the majority of trades there is not room tor them. Alreadv there are too many apprentices. Experience during the school year that is about to clo. reveals more than ever the growing tendency of emplov ers to draw from technical colleges for industrial recruits.

Every year the parent’s problem of what to do with the boy becomes increasingly acute. The held of industrial opportunity tends to diminish rather than to expand. Professions are in the main quite hopelessly overcrowded, and the depression in many trades has thrown the proportion of apprentices to journeymen thoroughly out of reckoning with the legal quota. Journeymen are dismissed, but apprentices must by law be retained. The result is discouraging to the industrial tyro and disconcerting to the parents who placed him in training. In the building trades, for example, there are already too many boys for the number of journeymen, and the Arbitration Court is now dealing with applications for a reduction of the quota in certain branches. Mr. H. Campbell, secretary of the Painters’ Union, is emphatic: “We find it sufficiently hard to place the boys who are waiting, without concerning ourselves immediately' with those who are leaving school,” he says. DEAD-END JOBS

The furniture trade, too, is experiencing trouble with apprenticeship problems, the number of journeymen having dwindled through consistent retrenchment, while apprentices remain upon the staff. Among the plumbers is found a significant illustration of this. A firm was reported recently to have five apprentices and no journeymen, whereas in normal circumstances there should be more journeymen than apprentices. No ray of brightness for the industrial recruit is shed by Mr. R. F. Barter, secretary of the Amalgamated Engineers’ Union, who has been endeavouring for some time to persuade parents not to place their boys into the engineering trade just now, on account of the entire absence of possibilities for advancement. “The boy who goes in for general engineering has nothing to look forward to but summary dismissal at the end of his period of indenture,” he says. “There is no work in New Zealand for him. As soon as he becomes a journeyman he must go.”

Normally the quota of apprentices to journeymen is two to one. In most countries it is one to three, and m England one to five. As things are just now, the proportion in general engineering throughout the Dominion is six apprentices to every journeyman, in those circumstances Mr. Baiter is not hopeful of placing many boys in the engineering trades. These few examples of trade dislocation are quoted to point a moral rather than to induce depression among those striving for positions. It is clear that there never was a time when the earnest investigation by parents of the industrial possibilities for their boys was so urgently re quired as it is today. Against this necessarily gloomy picture of the prospect for boy employ ment, is the assurance of the trade masters of the Seddon Memorial Tech’ nical College that the thoroughly trained youth does not experience anj great difficulty in securing a job. Ai the end of the final term of the yeai approaches many woodwork, engineer ing and commercial pupils went tc positions secured for them private!: through the authorities of the college COMPLETING STUDIES Under the new apprenticeship con ditions, closer contact than hitherto is maintained between the trades and the colleges, and if a boy enters a tradi before his studies are complete he ii attached to the night classes so tha he may complete his training. The boy-labour problem is in somi degree intensified by boys who lean school to enter jobs at an exception ally early age on account of thei fathers being out of work. The Government, through the De partment of Labour, is circularisin; schools with a view to ascertainin; how many boys are leaving school am seeking work. The compilation o these satistics, however, will help th situation but little if it is not accon pauied by some scheme for absorbin the boys' themselves into useful occi pations. L.J.C.