Munitions Output Misgivings
There was one passage in particular in Mr. Churchill's speech at Manchester last Saturday to which too much importance cannot be attached. It was that in which he spoke of the expansion of the munitions industries, and the need for much greater expansion. He alluded to a fact that has caused some misgiving, in spite of the impressive statistics quoted by the Prime Minister on Wednesday, that there are still 1,300,000 unemployed, a sign that "we have not taken all our slack up yet." He said that millions of new workers will be needed, among them more than a million women—nearly that number of women were employed on munitions in 1918. But Mr. Fred Smith, general secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, says in his comment on the speech that no application for the employment of women has yet been made either by the Government or the employers. This throws a rather disturbing light on the degree of expansion so far reached in munitions manufac- ture. If the industry is such that it still employs millions fewer workers, men and women, than it must do, does that not prove the need for a much greater speeding up? The problem of dilution of labour, which will have to be handled in an accommodating spirit by the Government and the unions, is not much more than an academic one until the unskilled additional labour is really needed. Incidentally Air. Smith pointed out that some 2,000 to 3,000 skilled members of his trade were in the army, and not in technical units. That is the sort of waste of skill which we hoped had been eliminated in this war.
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