MAN-POWER

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 56, Issue 4041, 29 April 1938, Page 6

MAN-POWER

BRITAIN’S NEW PROBLEM. ' ■—. I UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE. Not the least of Britain’s current problems is what is described as “an acute shortage of officers and men for the merchant service.” When the shipping industry, along with many others, was in the doldrums not so long ago, the thoughts of youth of seafaring stock and seafaring counties were discouraged from turning oceanwards by the sight of many out-of-work despondent sailors, and of idle shipyards where men were wont to hear the hammers busy on craft building to carry the new mariners. Now the trade has revived, but the recruits are not there, because it takes longer to build a sailor than to build a ship. The apprentice figures are illuminating. In 1929 there were 1430 new indentures. In 1931 they were down to 796. The lift in 1937 only brought them up to 857. These are the boys who should become officers. The already small figures have to be reduced still further because three or four years’ service must precede an examination for second mate. The residue must be wholly insufi’icent for a thriving trade. Naval Shortage. The problem is extended by the present policy of building up and strengthening the Royal Navy. In addition, it is whispered up and down England that there are two new battleships in prospect, but as yet the keels of these are laid only in the realm of fancy. However, there is enough work actually in progress to make authority look anxiously at the merchant personnel, for the two services have been and remain interdependent. In the last great emergency it was necessary to recruit 200,000 men from the merchant navy and the fishing fleets. Radical opinion shies violently at any suggestion to which the word conscription, however remotely, can be applied. The National Fitness campaign and the vocational training of the unemployed are entirely distinct in origin and administration; yet they have become linked in a suspicion that each is being used in a wide, subtle, and sinister move for civil conscription. The Government has been moved to make a public disclaimer, and Sir Edward Grigg, a confessed believer in compulsory training of some kind for the sake of national fitness, has withdrawn from the chairmanship of a Voluntary Fitness Centre, to lend point to the disclaimer and save embarrassment to his official friends and Conservative colleagues.