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Importance of communal feeding
There must be a great development of communal feeding. I doubt whether we shall be able to continue to maintain the stamina of our people if we rely solely on home feeding. With bombing in certain districts, gas cut off, electricity disturbed and communication interfered with, it may be necessary to have more than one meal a day in the factory canteen. We must take steps to make this canteen development more universal. I have discussed the problem of men and women working ten to twelve hours a day (ten is quite common) and two or three hours spent in traveling. I have pointed out the tremendous value it would be if, when leaving late at night with a long bus ride ahead of them, there was a short break, perhaps only five minutes, with the barrows going round the factory with good hot tea or milk and just a snack. It makes that journey home much more pleasant and not nearly so fatiguing. I want employers and the trade union in the factory to give consideration to this immediately; it will have a great effect in staving off the danger of colds and infection in the crowded busses or trains, especially at a time when the physical resistance is possibly at its lowest. That short break may represent in the year a great saving in labor turnover, absenteeism through illness, and a great increase in production.
Then we must not ignore the possible danger of invasion. Do not be complacent; be prepared for it. What better place is there for disciplining and controlling great masses of workpeople than in factories? Outside the works they are apt to become a rabble; inside, the people are accustomed to management and control, and if feeding arrangements are also available then the works is provided with an additional asset. Do not neglect them. Using the facilities offered by this cooperative effort and in this field, the works managers can assume a role of leadership unprecedented in the history of industry in this country. I do not mean that the works manager can do everything, but he can become the commanding officer and he should have to assist him a thoroughly trained personnel manager. This is a phase I feel it necessary to urge very strongly.
One of the essential things for health is to get warm quickly, and one of the essential things for getting warm quickly is food—and hot food. Canteens ought to be available and there ought to be communal kitchens available immediately the bombing takes place, so devised that they can carry on. I have been told this was an expense. Well, it is not half the expense of a day’s loss of production. It is not half the expense from the point of view of the morale of the workpeople we have got to maintain. And a very extraordinary kindliness grows out of it. I have seen Bristol, Southampton, Coventry and all London—all these places bombed. I raised the question immediately the blitzkrieg started on London of having coffee rooms and canteens run in every shelter. It has been a grand thing to have done. Let me give you an illustration.
I arranged with a great firm to carry out an experiment for me, because you have to move by trial and error in these things. I asked them to adopt rigidly the hours I had set down in the circular I had issued: to give ten minutes’ break in the morning, ten minutes in the afternoon with refreshment. The men had to work till seven at night and then there was a very long journey home, so I asked the management to send around barrows of tea and coffee at six o'clock in the evening, and to see the results. Well, I would like you to see the curve of production, particularly in the last two hours. If a man has been in the habit of stopping at fivve o'clock or 5.15 he goes home and he gets his meal about six-thirty or just after six. If he has got to work on with nothing to eat—well, there is a sinking feeling and then when he travels home on a long road (there were a number of women also) there is a great proneness to cold and to infection, and that means absenteeism due to ill health. Now, when that experiment I asked for had been going on for a month, I asked a director if he wanted to give it up and he said, "Not on your life. I have made too much out of it because of the increased productivity." In another case I had to transfer thousands of people to billets and fill up a munition works. Billets usually are pretty uncomfortable—compulsory billets are particularly uncomfortable because the landladies don't like having somebody dumped on them and—well, he isn't always made too happy. So the great trouble was, when workers left the works at six o'clock in the morning, to get a really good breakfast at home. Now, it is all very nice for us when we get up and have breakfast nicely arranged, but I have heard grumblings in hotels when it hasn't come up quickly enough; so I arranged that the canteens should become communal canteens in the morning, and that the men and women who were transferred from other districts should be able to get a wash and have a good breakfast before going home. This has revolutionized that place.
Now, in a war, 95 per cent of the cures of the illness in this country is done by domestic nursing, not by doctors at all. The main cures are done by home nursing—a little "Scotch milk" for a cold, and so on. But when you have to transfer people as we have—thousands now—and billet them in lodgings and all the rest of it, you have got to remember home comforts are gone and we have got to do something to substitute and minimize the effects of the discomfort. Add to that, bombing—when you get it—and the nerve-racking situation!
I do really want a new approach to the difficulties of the problem. I don't believe there is any way in which I can write out a Regulation or an Order or dispose of it that way. You can't just say to a man, "Work all night," and if the man cuts up rough, not give a bit of consideration as to whether the fellow has had food enough or has been looked after, or had meals enough. You know, really, we have got to enter into the feelings of the man that we are asking to do this work and to cut down the horrible disparities that have dominated our industrial life in the past. I say this emphatically, because I have to think as Minister of Labor of the country first—not only for this year, but possibly the next, in this war, and I want everyone to look ahead. However, time goes on, and there is always a danger of weariness taking the place of grimness; the testing time is going to come then, and I do beg of everybody to consider in your public life and everywhere else not merely this question of getting over present troubles, but the question of the task and the troubles we will have to face when the war becomes more and more intense. Because I don't believe we have yet seen the beginning of the war in its intensity. I believe that the devils of war will get far more intense as time goes on, and the issue of this war will be decided not only by the weight of metal but by the morale of your common people by whether they stand it out. It is on that that our liberties really depend at the last resort, and by which the future Government of the world will be determined.