THE SHORTAGE OF MANPOWER
SIR,—If an individual were to borrow money to buy tobacco or grapefruit or to see films his sanity would be questioned, and yet we are using the American Loan for those purposes. So what are we to do when the American and Canadian Loans are used up? Are we to reduce our food- intake to the level of the Germans'? The productivity of labour has been so reduced that it requires 400,000 people more than before the war to maintain the same volume of exports as in 1938. Yet we know that we need to export 75 per cent. more than we did in that year. We therefore require perhaps 500,000 more men engaged in making goods for export. Whence are we to get them? We shall get soldiers home from India, Burma and Egypt, and we could vacate Palestine completely and Greece, but we shall need still more men. Our only recourse is to take men away from making capital goods, e.g. from restoring our railways and widening our roads, and turn them to making goods for export. We may even have to choose between food and new houses. We may have to have fewer clothing coupons. At any rate we shall have to cease to buy, from the U.S.A., films, tobacco and grapefruit which we have been having lately, The coal-shortage will drastically reduce our exports. After Dunkirk our factories worked overtime for many weeks. Prolonged overtime only results in a decreased output, but one wonders why miners have not been asked to work overtime for a period, say, of six weeks.
There is one more consideration. Prices in America have risen much less than here. No foreigner who could get an American 'car would dream of buying an English one, as for the price of an Austin eight he could buy a beautifully made and capacious American car. Every year the American worker increases his output by 3 per cent. and ours by only 1 per cent., so that we fall more and more behind in the race for industrial efficiency. To take only one small example, it requires three times as many man hours to make a wireless-set in England as it does in the U.S.A. So as to buy the food and raw materials that we need, therefore, we may be obliged to subsidise our exports very heavily, and this will still further reduce our standard of living.—Yours faithfully,
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