SHORTER HOURS?

Waipukurau Press, Volume XXVIII, Issue 64, 9 March 1933, Page 8

SHORTER HOURS?

M ECHA NIS ATI ON THEN D AND UNEMPLOYMENT LONDON, January 25. Will increased mechanisation create a large body of permanent out-of-works? Will shorter hours solve the unemployment problem? These vital questions were discussed by Mr. Laurence J. Cadbury at a luncheon of the Industrial Co-Part-nership Association in London yesterday. Mr. Cadbury said that if the employment pitch since the war had not been' queered by other causes he did not believe that mechanisation would have been under the cloud it was. If other causes had not been there to upset equilibrium the process of adjustment might have kept reasonably close to the advances of productive methods. If that had been the case, then machines would not have been stigmatised, as now, as a major cause of unemployment. Despite mechanisation having advanced as rapidly in them as anywhere else, electrical egnineering and motor manufacturing, Mr. Cadbury pointed out, had shown increasing numbers of insured workers. The increased output of industry required more people to handle it, and they found the same expansion progressing in distributive trades. Tf, he added, a system of shorter hours were introduced, which raised costs of industrial production, it would aggravate the discrepancy between the price level of manufactured articles and raw materials—one of the main causes of economic disequilibrium and unemployment in the world to-day. The German “Krumper” and similar systems of surplus staff that stood off in rotation greatly reduced this danger. At the same time they distributed employment over more people—the prime aim of shorter hours at the present moment. Ar 1 the problem of equilibrium became resolved. Mr. Cadbury believed we could change into a shorter working week, but that to insist on it now was impracticable.