HELP OTHER THAN DOLES
THE conscience of the nation has awoken- to realize that it has other duties to the unemployed besides paying them a dole. The awakening has come gradually, as indeed did the need. In the early years it was much if we could keep workless people from starving. For those whose unemployment is in essence temporary and who, we may assume, will eventually be re-absorbed by the trade which has thrown them out, that may still be the main thing. But even temporary unemployment raises other acute questions as time goes on. And notoriously we have now many hundreds of thousands of cases where the problem is not temporary at all.
The commissioners, whom the Government has sent out to report on the special distressed areas, may prove able, here or there, to throw new light. But the broad features of the need are already familiar. How has the Ministry of Labour tried to meet them ? For adults, by. three types of institution—" training " centres, "instructional" centres, and centres for physical training. At the first, the trainee is taught a specific trade or occupa- tion, with a view to his filling a post in it. The idea has been that as far as possible everyone accepted for a course should be found a job when trained. This, when you think about it, is common sense ; for to put a young man through a course qualifying him to be, let us say, a restaurant waiter, would be a pure waste of his time and the State's money if there were no prospect that any hotel or restaurant would then employ him. But it means limiting the number of trainees approximately to that of the posts which can be expected to become available. If you depart from that principle (as at times there has been an impulse to do), you risk impairing the keen and practical atmosphere, by which the work of this class of centres has been characterized. Only as employment improves and the prospects of placing workers expand can you safely expand your training centres ; and expansion in this sense is now making good progress.
It follows that the " training " centres have never dealt with more than a comparatively few thousands of uneni- ployed per year. Theirs is the best treatment, wherever it can be applied ; for it takes its subjects right out Of unemployment for good, and is particularly valuable fOr young people living in places where there is no prospect of their ever being employed at a local trade or being able, under commercial conditions, to learn any other. But for the mass of workers mouldering on the dole something else had to be atteMpted. So there were deVeloped the " instructional " centres, with the object, not of teaching a particular trade, but of stimulating and Conserving physical and mental fitness. Here, the enthusiast for educational improvement might suppose, was an unlimited field ; but it proved not so. There are all sorts of difficulties—the difficulty of organizing classes and curricula, where those attending may come and go at any time, according as they fall into or out of work ; the difficulty of overcoming the adult workman's tradt-, tional feeling that" " school " in any form is something juvenile which he has outgrown ; the difficulty, more broadly, of spinning ropes out of sand, and giving to miscellaneous collections of workless people opportunities for self-improvement which they will value on a voluntary basis. That in many cases all these. difficulties have been overcome and excellent work has been done by keen staffs, does not alter the conclusion, that here, too, we have a method of by no means unlimited application.
The centres for physical training have made a wider appeal, because the number of unemployed who can see the value of being at pains to improve their physique is naturally much larger. The principle may be carried out in one of two ways—either by a period at a camp in huts or under canvas or by attendance at a local centre.
The first way is popular, and for young unemployed, who have thoroughly gone to seed through worklessness, it often gives results which could scarcely be obtained otherwise. But it calls for rather exceptional qualities in the staff ; and financially, even on the cheapest basis, is expensive per head. The method of attendance at .local centres is capable of much wider application, and is now being extended rapidly.
We do not propose to discuss here the instruction centres for juveniles, which are shortly to be developed on a very large scale. They will be under the local education authorities ; they will have compulsion behind them ; and, save in the matter of intermittent attendance as boys fall into or out of work, they present few of the difficulties noted above in the same degree. . But if we keep our attention upon the adults, it is obvious that for anything like an adequate policy the State's efforts will need to be supplemented by a great deal of voluntary work. This is one of those fields in which no single set of cut-and-dried solutions will suffice, and where the diversity, the personal initiative, and the free experi- mentalism of voluntary effort are quite indispensable. In many cases, it may be, the State can establish useful contacts with the voluntary bodies, as is already happen- ing in regard to centres for physical instruction. Bat the essential thing is that these bodies should be more strongly supported, both financially and still more by way of personal service, and that their scale and scope should be very greatly extended. Particularly in the relatively prosperous areas, and above all in London and the Home counties, British people must be brought to realize what a very different life their fellow-country. men are leading on the coalfields and in the cotton towns and in the districts which used to live by their ship- yards.
The revival of trade, which the rest of the country has experienced, has touched these areas of distress but little ; that was perhaps the gloomiest feature which emerged from the debate on the Ministry of Labour Vote. The claim for sympathy and help, which the facts bespeak, has not (especially since the Prince of Wales urged it) gone unanswered ; but it needs to be met much more fully. We hope that the Government's commissioners, when they make their reports, will not confine them to saying what Whitehall can do, but will help to make clearer to the large well-disposed but ill- informed, public what help they can best give and what initiatives they can wisely support.
The increasing tendency today in all social matters is to leave everything to the State. It appears, not only among the victims of distress, who more and more " look to the Government," but also in middle-class society, which, whenever the cry of suffering reaches its ears, is apt to be content with asking what the Government has done and finding easy fault with it. One need not be an old-fashioned individualist to feel that this attitude often goes too far. The obligations that lie on each of us as " our brother's keeper " may not all be discharged vicariously. Amid so much that cannot be done without the State, there remains much that the State cannot do.
Previous page
