Exhortation and Organisation
In a speech at Leeds last Saturday, Mr. Herbert Morrison said that the shortage of manpower might get worse, but that bottlenecks in general were no cause for gloom since they amounted to evidence that the economy was expanding. If the Lord President had not made such play with those two much-abused words "manpower and "bottleneck," it would have been easier to discern the realitizs of the situation which he tried to portray. The word "manpower," when it was invented in the 1914-18 war, did not simply mean "men," but number of workers multiplied by work done. Con- sequently, to admit that the manpower situation may get worse is to admit that the number of workers is falling off at a faster rate than output is going up—or in other words that the production drive has failed. Now Mr. Morrison did not mean that. Like everybody else he was using the word manpower loosely and making it synonymous with men. At present anyone who wants employment can have it. Therefore output can only be increased by increasing production per head. One way of doing that is to exhort everybody to work harder, which is what the Government are doing. But that is not the only way. Another way, and a very important way, is to be extremely careful in allocating resources between re-equipment of factories and production of consumers' goods. The time is coming when some shortages must be removed by slowing the pace of capital reconstruction in some cases. This is not to say that reconstruction schemes are unnecessary. But some are more necessary than others.
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