BLIND-ALLEY OCCUPATIONS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 370, 13 September 1930, Page 13 (Supplement)

BLIND-ALLEY OCCUPATIONS.

Blind-alley employment is one of the curses of our social system, the Manchester Guardian declared recently. Because it offers comparatively good wages to begin with it often attracts young people. Then they grow up having no trade, no qualifications, and when times of industrial depression come they suffer most from unemployment. A man without a trade is a helpless individual. He cannot even learn a trade, because his years of unintelligent work have dulled him. He is the casual labourer, the picker-up of odd jobs, and it is one of the indications of the changes that compulsory education is bringing about that children, on leaving school, should be demanding the right to take up work which leads somewhere. As this process goes on it will become increasingly difficult for employers to find unskilled labour at all. They will have to offer more pay for it. and they will have to bring the general conditions of work for the unskilled labourer into line with those of more favoured occupations. That is to say, they will have to make blind-alley occupations lead at least to a decent standard of life. There will be a great incentive, too, for them to discover means of mechanising unskilled work. As education makes men too intelligent to spend their days breaking stones it will, at the same time, make them so intelligent that they wlil be able to devise machines for doing such work for them. And until that happens the breakers of stones will have to be properly treated, otherwise their children at least will see to it that they find some more profitable occupation.