LEAVES FROM THE INSPECTOR'S NOTEBOOK.
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Have Labour Exchanges Helped Industry ? Government Takes Long Credit.
'.AS ANYONE you know ever found the muchboomed Labour or Employment Exchanges of any practical value in getting hold of assistance, of 'Anything like the right sort, when it was wanted? I know large numbers of employers who ,.. will have nothing to do with them, whatever. And I know an even larger number of 'people who consider that one national economy that should; without hesitation, be effected is the immediate and entire abolition of the whole costly and elaborate organization.
. * * * The idea of the original scheme was, it. must be admitted, a good one. The Government set out to prevent .the co-existence of surplus labour in one part of the country and a shortage elsewhere. That -was the theory, but, as in the case of the Freight Exchanges, the percentage of fits over misfits is so very low that the scheme cannot be 'developedpractically. The Employment Exchange is net used by the competent craftsman, in nine times out of ten. The majority of its regular customers are those for whom it is Most difficult to find a venturesome employer. It is in the nature of things that the Exchanges do not get the handling of employees or of jobs that are either of them outstandingly attractive. And, while there is plenty of work about, they never will. When work is difficult to find they will get the applicants and will have no jobs for them.
Your average employer will tell you that the class of people whom the Exchanges send you are generally as poor in promise of good help as could be imagined. The test of the effectiveness of the activities of the Labour Offices has been their failure, with hundreds of thousands of hands out of work, to counteract the undoubted impossibility in some industries of getting all the help that is wanted. I am not bold enough ' to write " scrap the lot," unless we are convinced that they have no ultimate chance of success. But, I should be happier to know that an alternative seheine could be Contrived to make known, in general terms, local requirements at frequent intervals and to facilitate postal communication and travel. Failing that, there appears to me to be no shadow of doubt that it will be cheaper and wiser by far to throw overboard the whole elaborate and costly scheme. There are plenty of local Pensions and other quasi-official centres who would jump at the premises! But, such a decision would only increase the unemployment problem by removing Government employment from tens of thousands who find Employment Exchange work sufficiently remunerative and, certainly, not too strenuous.
Porters' Joy-rides on Platform Trucks.
What a very nice and pleasing business is being done with those little electric battery trucks for platform and warehouse use. Particularly is their increasing employment by railway companies for platform work becoming noticeable. In many cases, it is quite evident to the travelling public that they afford a ready means of speeding up the movement of baggage and parcels on station and warehouse premises while at the' same time conserving the wellestablished energies of the average railway porter I There are many instances, however, to be seen as one travels about, of their quite inefficient use. Twice last week on one of the Northern "Trunk lines, I saw one truck loaded, each time with two or three tiny parcels, driven by one porter and carrying an assistant operator. In neither case, I was careful to notice, was it a ease of going to fetch another load, as the two men carried the parcels to the truck and left the truck at the end of a platform journey. Of course machines like this cannot always be fully loaded, but the idea naturally occurs to one as to whether this is not another instance of the desirability of adapting carriage and delivery methods to the new means, rather than of trying to use powerdriven machines to operate on old "horse-drawn" or " hand-pulled" lines. Railway companies and others do not buy electric trolleys to save porters and warehousemen trouble, but to speed up transport.and cheapen its cost, audit is just as true of these little newcomers as of the lunger-established lorry that it pays to organize the traffic to secure. maximum ton-mileage, and that neglect to improve organization in this way throws away half the advantage of the new method.
Government Takes Long Credit.
It must, of course, be admitted that one of the most 'harassing war-time tasks, in a Civil Service sense, must have been that known as "Accounts." I had the pleasure of knowing one' or two of the pricipaI D.M.A.s, as they were called—Directors of Munitions Accounts—and in the cases that came to my particular notice, the thankless and certainly very boring and uninteresting task of certifying and passing for payment what were, literally, hundreds of thousands of bills a 'week, was accomplished very efficiently and, generally, vvy courteously. The best of these Directors have gone back to their professional activities long ago, and, in not a few cases, less competent and experiencea substitutes have been left to tackle what is still an enormous accumulation of accounts rendered by contractors—and, naturally enough, accounts that have been left over are not of the simplest and least involved character.
I was talking to a leading contractor the other day —a man who is now' again a very prominent figure in the civilian manufacturing side of things—and he told me that he and one or two others still had large sums of money owing to them by the Government, for the unconvincing reason that the Government could not satisfy itself that it had ever had the machines. The manufacturers hold receipts in proper order, but the Ministry's own records of allocation arid enumeration are, in so many cases, faulty that they claim to be unable to identify. many. specific deliveries and what actually became of them...In the meantime, the Maker with his papers all in ,order ea,nnot be paid; because the buyer, in this case the Government, cannot make out what it has done with what it has bonght. What equity there is about such muddle-headed. treatment it .is impossible 'to eonjecture. I buy a pair of boots you see, they, are sent home 'and I sign for them. Weeks afterwards, have no idea at all as to what I did with the, boas, who had them, where they-are now. So; Is' ply refuse to pay the bootshop Until; if ever, I discover who it was who took them. What the bootmaker does, of course, is apparent. And between you and me, that's just what ex-contractors, still being bothered in this way, should do tool