WHAT IS WRONG WITH ENGLISH COTTON MILLS?
Lancashire Lags In Export Drive I (By Reece Smith, New Zealand) Kemsley Empire Journalist) Manchester, Sept. 3. Bone headed, frightened, or denuded of labour. These are alternative reasons why the Lancashire textile industry, given early billing as a star of Britain’s export drive, should now be the whipping boy for anyone in London making public claim that the export drive is lagging. These people say the industry is jogging along with outworn equipment and ideas, dismally lacking the dynamic of the times. Sir Stafford Cripps has offered a 25 per cent new machinery subsidy for spinning firms provided they band together into units of at least 40,000 spindles. So far there have been no # mergers for this subsidy. In Lancashire they invite the London critics to come up and try to do better. There are idle looms in the mills. Extra labour could increase production from these, without new machinery. The Cripps offer is branded as the thin end of a nationalisation wedge.. Cotton owners, holding what they have, say he would find it easier to take over the .merged groups than the many 10,.000 spindle firms.. They ignore or see no force in the argument that one sure way to get themselves nationalised is to make no effort to set their own house in order. Below, inarticulate, is fear of the rice standard. Lancashire mgchiriery firms are shipping millions of pounds worth of spinning and weaving equipment to Egypt, Pakistan, India, China, Brazil and .elsewhere. The days are still remembered here when the Japanese drove Lancashire exports down from 40,000 million to 1,500 million yards a year. j This competition was from cloth j woven by workers on about two- j pence and a bowl of rice per 12-hour day. Already Mac Arthur- is nursing Japan back into textile production, partly to ensure a friendly Japan against Russia, partly to ensure' a market for Dixie cotton, and partly to lighten the Japanese burden on the American taxpayer. None of these reasons appeals to Lancashire men who have seen their towns turned into'distressed areas through the price victory of'the rice standard over the meat standard. High qality goods, which Oriental races do not produce, were never the backbone in quality or revenue of the Lancashire trade. The staple was millions of yards of ordinary cloth which used .to go out to those countries now setting up their own plant and starting out as export rivals. ’ There is more than a suspicion that British capital is helping buy the British machinery I to set up new plants in these 5 cheap labour areas, and in the result permanently to prune the Lancashire textile industry. For the immediate present it does ‘not look as though additional labour would give the cotton industry ' a 1 chance to silence criticism. 1 But the industry has a bad name 1 with the workers, a name it thoroughly earned. It is not so long , ago , that short time and on-the-spot fir- I ] ing were usual 1 practices. N Came. the war and the industry, c by that time tolerably well recover- ( ed from the slump, was damped ] down. Workers made off to highly paid jobs in clean, modern munitions dactories. Some are drifting j. back as the boom melts away in cer- j. tain light industries. But it is doubtful whether the in- s dustry will ever, in these next few i years so vital to Britain’s finances, have all the workers it wants, or I all the production Cripps wants, g And it is doubtful whether, after r those few years, it will want all the I workers it has. r
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Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 98, 22 September 1948, Page 4
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613WHAT IS WRONG WITH ENGLISH COTTON MILLS? Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 98, 22 September 1948, Page 4
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