WORK WANTED

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 90, Issue 8, 10 January 1946, Page 5

WORK WANTED

manFunemployed SERIOUS POSITION IN SYDNEY 500 EX-SERVICEMEN APPLY FOR FOUR VACANCIES Recd. 5.5 p.m. Sydney, Jan. 9. As hundreds of ex-servicemen are added daily to those in search of employment, there is growing concern as to the number of positions available. By next June all members of the services, except those needed for garrison <luty, will have been demobilised, according to the co-ordinator of demobilisation, General Savige. Bet ween August 15 last and the end of this month 276,000 will have been discharged, with a further 200,000 following up to the end of June. An appeal is being made by the Director of Manpower, Mr. W. Funnell, to employers to co-operate in placing exservicemen in jobs. •

“Up till November, before the industry was paralysed by strikes, we were going well,” he said to-day. “New South Wales had demobilised 79,325 men, of whom only 250 required sustenance allowances.”

The position in Sydney is serious, as was evidenced when nearly 500 unemployed ex-servicemen applied for four vacancies advertised in a newspaper. The applicants belonged to many skilled, as well as unskillea, trades. Some had been out of work since their discharge months ago. The advert ised vacancies were for win-dow-cieaners. The first applicants arrived three hours before the advertised time and a queue soon extended from a first floor office downstairs and along the street. A notice pinned to the wall concluded: “Don’t apply if you can’t stand heights. You may fall only orce.” The pay was £6 for a five-day week, or £5, with wage-tax deducted. It was not an attractive job for any young man, but for those 500 it represented the only hope in a long time of finding employment at steady wages. 0 An interviewer stated that amongst 150 men he spoke to were steelworkers, riggers, glaziers, painters, clerks, seamen, labourers, and representatives of many other trades. One applicant who was discharged from the Army three months ago is the father of seven children, and another, a veteran of the first World War, has four sons in the A.I.F. Many were still in uniform and wore 1939 and 1945 Africa and Pacific Stars. Five ex-servicemen said . that after serving more than five years they genuinely sought employment, and could not obtain it.

Even discharged doctors and dentists are having trouble. Here, the bottleneck is in accommodation. Many doctors and dentists who left practices io enlist have found, on their return, that their rooms have been let to other members of the profession. Returned men find they have no legal claim to the premises they occupied before the war. The B.M.A. and the Australian. Dental Association have formed a joint committee to offer what help they can. The problem of “dilutees” and “elevatees” has also to be dealt with. Dilutees are men who ’/ere drawn from other occupations, given brief skilled training and employed at award rates. Elevatees are men given the status of qualified tradesmen before completing , the technical training normally required by unions. These emeregency classes must clash with returning tradesmen. A Bill will be introduced during the next session of the Federal Parliament providing that the services of dilutees and elevatees in the metal trades should be used in every possible manner, and dispensed with only when ex-service tradesmen have to be found employment. More than 12,000 servicemen could re-enter the engineering industry in their own right as tradesmen. The class about which most concern is felt is the younger long-service personnel, whose qualifications, after the loss of years in the defence of the country, entitle them to unskilled, or semi-skilled, jobs only.