NATIONAL SERVICE.
WITH the spirit of the appeal addressed by Mr. Neville Chamberlain on Tuesday to a meeting at the Central Hall, Westminster, mainly composed, according to reports, of elderly men, there will be universal agreement. In order to win the war the nation must have more labour to carry on certain essential industries, and that labour can only be supplied by calling up the men and women who arc now either unoccupied or engaged in industries which are non-essential. Mr. Neville Chamberlain appeals to all men between the ages of eighteen and sixty-one to volunteer. At the same time, he is organizing through the capable bands of Mrs. H. J. Tennant and Miss Violet Markham a similar appeal to women. In spite of the magnificent work that many women are already doing, there is undoubtedly a larger supply of unoccupied women to be drawn upon than of unoccupied men, and it might in some ways have been better if Mr. Neville Chamberlain had directed his appeal to both sexes simultaneously. That however is a detail which will adjust itself. The main point is to get the necessary labour. Mr. Neville Chamberlain's proposal is that all male persons between the ayes of eighteen and sixty-one, including persons already engaged on national work, should register themselves at the nearest Employment Exchange by means of a form obtained from a post office. Having done this, they wait till they are called up. When called up they either go to an Employment Exchange, or, as Mr. Chamberlain with some touch of humour explained, if they cannot find the way to the Exchange they go to a specified public building where an official of the Employment Exchange will be waiting to receive them. This official will then examine them, and will decide whether they are better employed in the industry in which they are at the time engaged, or whether it will be desirable in the national interest to transfer them to some other industry. Mr. Chamberlain begged the public not to criticize his scheme, but it is impossible to avoid saying at the very outset that this feature of the scheme will not only lead to criticism but, we fear, to serious friction. Mr. Chamberlain himself was obviously aware that the Employment Exchanges are intensely unpopular through- out the country both with employer and employed. Mr. Hodge, the new Minister for Labour, now responsible for this organization, has admitted the fact in the bluntest language, referring to his own officials as " wooden images." We have ourselves received complaints from all kinds of people as to the treatment which they have received from these wooden images " when they have gone to offer their services to the nation. Almost of necessity the officials employed in the Exchanges arc men of very limited education, with an even more limited knowledge of the world. The Daily Graphic pub- lished on Wednesday morning a. photograph of the audience that listened to Mr. Neville Chamberlain's appeal. The photograph shows row upon row of elderly men, obviously of the professional or propertied classes. To ask such men, as these to submit themselves to the judgment of a young clerk, who ought himself in many cases to be fighting,, is, we fear, to expose Mr. Chamberlain's scheme to a very great and unnecessary strain. The position is made the more difficult because the Govern- ment themselves have not yet made up their mind what industries are essential and what are non-essential. One would have imagined that the first step for Mr. Neville Cham- berlain to take before launching his scheme was to issue a schedule of non-essential industries. He apologized for not doing so, the apology amounting to a confession that it is difficult to decide. Yet a point which apparently Mr. Neville Chamberlain and the Cabinet are unable to decide is to be left in individual cases to the decision of some junior clerk with practically no experience of life. This part of Mr. Chamber- lain's scheme is, as far as we can judge, unworkable, and will have to be modified, if not abandoned, if any progress is to be made. The proposal is so contrary to the views expressed by Mr. Hodge, to the hints thrown out by Mr. Chamberlain himself, and to the universal opinion of the country that we can only assume that by some strange method the officials of these Employment Exchanges have misled the- Government into backing up their organization at the risk of prejudicing a valuable scheme. It is sufficient to state that already tens of thousands of persons, men and women, have in response to various public appeals recorded their names at Employment Exchanges, and declared their willingness to undertake any kind of national work Weeks and months have gone by, and except for an occasional post- card to ask whether they have found other work, nothing more has been heard by these volunteers of the offer they have made. People who have been through this experience, and the friends of people who have suffered from it, are not likely again to touch the Employment Exchanges or to look kindly upon any scheme which takes them as its nucleus.
Very wisely, Mr. Chamberlain has reserved another string for his'bow. He proposes to work largely through Local Authori- ties. It is a pity that he did not decide to work solely through them, and above all to work through existing local organiza- tions rather than to create new ones. There is already in existence a most valuable organization which on the whole has secured the respect of the country—namely, the local Tribunals engaged in dealing with problems arising out of military conscription. These Tribunals must be getting near to an end of their task. They could quite easily be switched on to deal with the new industrial problem now before the country. Indeed there is no reason why the two problems should not simultaneously be dealt with by the same Tribunal. The members of these Tribunals have the information, and they have the authority which their local position gives them. It would indeed be possible to give to these Tribunals not only power to deal with volunteers, but also power to offer, let us say, a hint to non-volunteers that their services would be welcomed. The machinery for this also is to a largo extent in existence. Eighteen months ago at very great expense a National Register was formed, comprising both men and women. As far as can be ascertained, comparatively little use has of late been made of that Register. It is however an excellent piece of work, a real enrolment, and has to a certain extent been brought up to date, and could be revised without much expense. It is local in character, so that the information contained in it could be utilized by local Tribunals.
Instead of employing either of these two existing organi- zations, Mr. Chamberlain, so far as we can follow hi:scheme, proposes to set up an entirely new organization which is to be superimposed both upon the Employment Exchanges and upon the Local Authorities. Commissioners and ub-Com- missioners are to be appointed, presumably new offices will have to be hired to house them, and clerks si ill have to be engaged to do a mass of clerical work. No estimate was given by Mr. Chamberlain of what this gigantic new organization is going to cost the country, or of the amount of labour that will be diverted from practical work to the piling up of eta- tistics. Nor did Mr. Chamberlain indicate the kind of salary which he proposes to pay to the army of officials and clerks whom he is going to engage. There is to be a minimum wage of 25s. a week for those who volunteer for national work, bat the new officials who are to engage these volunteers are not likely to be content with any such payment for themselves. Looking at the scheme as a whole, we cannot help feeling anxious as to whether it has been sufficiently thought out. Two matters should have been defined at the outset—first, the precise class of worker that is required for national service ; secondly, the class of work that is non-essential to the nation. With these two categories clearly defined it would have been relatively easy to take action. At present not only is the whole scheme vague, but it involves as drawn up an enormous amount of labour which will admittedly be useless. Why, foe example, should people already engaged in national work be put to the trouble of registering themselves, thus creating a great amount of additional clerical work, on the off-chance that they may have to be moved to some other place than the place in which they are now working ? The problem involved is a comparatively simple one. It has to be dealt with almost every day by manufacturers in the course of their business, and it is dealt with efficiently and rapidly through the foremen of, the works concerned and through the Trade Unions in- volved. A considerable waste of time and money and paper will result from this needless inclusion in Mr. Neville Chamber- lain's scheme of people already nationally employed. More generally, we feel that the scheme begins at the wrong end. The primary point is to diminish the employment of labour in non-essential industries. That can bo done in one of two ways—either by prohibiting certain industries, or by taxing certain forms of consumption so as to make non- essential industries unprofitable to the persons now engaged in carrying them on. By one or other of these means labour would be liberated, and the labour thus liberated would become available for national work.
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