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INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY
All these efforts will be nullified unless industry itself concentrates on raising its efficiency. I have noticed in the public discussions that everybody's mind turns on the efficiency of the workers. Efficiency must be meant in a broader sense than that. It is not even efficiency in the finishing end of industry or part of an industry. If you take the metallurgical industry as an example, and want to study efficiency, you must go from the raw material, coal, right up to the finished product, and see whether in each stage you have an efficient and well conducted operation, just as much as on the horizontal basis you study the product at a particular stage. When we discuss efficiency we cannot have somebody just butting in with a lot of out-of-date selling price arrangements, carrying redundant capital, paying each other levies and all the rest of it, and adding them on to the price and creating a moribund attitude to the whole development of their industries. That is not efficiency. While efficiency will be applied generally, there is the difficulty of localised unemployment. It may develop in particular industries for particular reasons. Last week there was a long discussion in the House on the distribution of industry, and I do not propose to refer to it, but perhaps I may be allowed to refer to the distribution, transfer and training of labour. Large scale transfer of labour is not, in my view, the answer to localised unemployment. Certain grave social disorders arise from it. One is that it denudes the areas concerned of their most valuable resources, their young man-power, and results in appalling waste of social capital which would be better spent on developments.
We do not, therefore, regard large scale transfers as the solution. At the same time, we must have mobility of labour; that is an essential condition. An expanding economy entails a certain degree of mobility of labour as well as of industry. I have not found in the war, given the right conditions, much difficulty in transferring labour [Interruption]. I know that difficulties have arisen from those I have taken, but there has not been much difficulty. If I had to direct people to jobs that were inferior, they very properly objected, but where the conditions have been pretty good I have not had very much trouble. There are other reasons why they may object—home reasons, and so on. I do not regard the transfer of women as I have had to do it in the war in the same category. It is a different problem altogether. One of the first things we must do is to establish training under Government auspices and no longer regard it as remedial action for long-term unemployment. It must be part and parcel of our economic system. It must be part of our permanent arrangements, and industrialists or anyone establishing an industry can help in this respect. I have seen works going up, and I have seen the unemployed standing about in the neighbourhood, but nobody has thought of beginning to train the unemployed while the works were actually being built. In very few cases have facilities been there, and my predecessors have had to go to the employers and say, "I have 10,000 unemployed and you must give them a preference in this area," or they have had to use persuasion, and all that kind of thing. There has been no organised attempt to have training programmes arranged in advance so that no time would be lost when the equipment and premises were ready to start up.
There will be an enormous lot to be done in that direction, and there must be a scientific approach by employers and trade unions. We must pay the trainees better than unemployment pay. It must be a step up to the full wages they will get in industry. We must have full co-operation with both sides of industry. I know how hard craft prejudices die, and there are good economic reasons for them all. If the State comes in in the development of full employment and the fears that have helped to produce these prejudices are removed, I think it is possible to get greater flexibility than we have hitherto had. One great trouble is that of housing. If a person has to move from one area to another and the only way he can get a habitation is to take up a mortgage and get his furniture on the hire-purchase system, it acts as a dead weight round him. Therefore, houses for rent are enormously important in order to get mobility of labour.