JUVENILE UNEMPLOYMENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 68, 11 June 1927, Page 24 (Supplement)

JUVENILE UNEMPLOYMENT

POSITION IN BRITAIN

BLIND-ALLEY OCCUPATIONS Probably the most lasting of the injuries caused by the prolonged depression of trade will be found to be its effect on the young people who were about to enter industry when the bad times came. There are over a million of such possible recruits to industry every year, and though unemployment is always apt to be demoralising it is particularly so in thencase because this is a highly impressionable age and because of those who do And work a larger proportion take on “blind alley” occupations and lose for ever all chance of apprenticing themselves to a skilled trade,, says a writer in “The Manchester Guardian.” The last six years have added to the industrial population far too many whose fcabits have been formed and perhaps fixed under conditions of unemployment or of employment on entirely unskilled and uneducative work. They will be able to do so much the less good either for themselves or for the industry of the country whose future largely depends on the quality of its workmen.

This matter is dealt with in a most useful article by Mr. C. E. Clift in the April number of the “International Labour Review.” Mr. Clift, who was formerly chairman of the Salford Juvenile Employment Committee, says that so long as the congested state of the labour market and consequent demand for cheap labour continLies “those who are called upon to advise young people about their employment must be prepared to compromise with the evils of blind alley’ occupations—an attitude that would be condemned as rank heresy before the war.” No doubt this is true. A “blind alley” occupation may be better than none at all. But the lesson surely is that we ought not to allow the “demand for cheap labour” to present the rising generation with a choice of only two almost equally disastrous alternatives. It is during a trade depression that it becomes particularly urgent to reinforce the efforts, voluntary and official, of those who assume the responsibility for the “vocational guidance” of young people, by setting up some system of training or apprenticeship which would serve as a barrier to the overwhelming economic pull to the “blind alley”

and the evils of the employment exchange. This could be done simply and straightforwardly by raising the school leaving age to sixteen. If that is for the moment an impracticable ideal Mr. Clift urges "the institution of part-time day continuation schools on a compulsory basis, as contemplated in the Education Act of 1915.” It will be said that the cost would be prohibitive. And yet as a mere matter of business it would probably pay handsomely in the long run to train these young people rather than let them run to seed either as unemployed or in jobs from which they will be automatically turned off before they are twenty. They are a financial burden as it is. Why should we not make a virtue of necessity and make their idleness an excuse for giving them educational advantages which in times of good trade we should be told would prevent them from earning their living? No doube the depression in trade seems an admirable excuse for doing nothing, but it is, in fact, an admirable opportunity for taking in hand reforms

which, to a certain type of mind, will always seem inadvisable either because we are too poor to pay for them or too busy making money to be able to afford the time.