National Labour Exchange Year
By DAVID LAZELL
M sin present era of instant unemployment, a fine flourish of government policy, is, I hear,
to be followed by National Labour Exchange Year, an inspired campaign designed to arouse new confidence in those barren, green-painted halls offering employment as plasterers in distant housing projects, as chefs to domesticated panel- beaters, as policemen to those who are big enough and strong enough. The campaign is long over- due.
My encounters with the labour exchange have enjoyed all the wit of a Carry On film, e.g.: Doleful employment-hunter: 'Got any good jobs?'
Glum Exchange official: `Do you think I'd be here if we had?'
Despite the cheerful radio plugs for labour ex- changes, I have found them singularly inefficient places, staffed, at counter level, by people ob- viously intended for a less demanding way of life. I nearly worked in one myself. Some eight years ago, at the conclusion of my college career, I ventured into a grim Ministry of Labour build- ing situated in the centre of a prosperous Mid- lands town. The gentleman behind the counter seemed primarily concerned that I should sit at the correct cubicle, although the room was other- wise empty. When I suggested that I might earn elevens pounds a week, a modest enough wage in that diligent community, he turned, as they say, nasty.
`You'll never earn that!' he declared. '1 don't earn that much.'
He added that there was a vacancy in the labour exchange itself; with my social science diploma, I'd get the job all right ... and at eight pounds per week. That was the extent of his enter- prise. Exercising some of my own, I visited the local Co-op and was offered a job in the leakage accounts department (at almost eleven pounds per week).
A year or two ago, I was sufficiently gullible to believe the optimistic posters of the Profes- sional and Executive Register. I visited the local office, went through a somewhat casual inter- view, and was subsequently bombarded with buff cards inquiring if I had yet found a job. That was, indeed, the extent of any effective service. Subsequently, I visited the Professional and Executive Register of a West Country city. I was unduly and unwisely optimistic, as the manager of this office had recently broadcast on the ex- tent of his office's enterprise and success. That wet Monday morning, I met, by appointment, a young and obviously inexperienced Ministry of Labour official, who promised to contact a few local companies on my behalf. A week later, I telephoned him. He said that his letters hadn't yet come back from the typing pool upstairs. I never heard from him again . . . although I re- ceived, a few weeks later, a small buff card inquir- ing if I had yet secured employment. A day or two earlier, I had been engaged by an advertising agency and found myself working with an avuncular gentleman in his late sixties. He came in on morningslonl Yi)having, recently istirld,,frwn full-time employment as a Ministry of Labour executive, ironically enough, in the local ex- change. It was, he assured me, an easy life with generous pay and holidays. He advised me to take a job there (if I could get in). But I remembered the sheaf of 'situations vacant' pages torn from local newspapers and hanging at the counter of my local office, and decided to stay in business. In any case, that dark green paint would have depressed me.
I hope that, in the present squeeze, 1 have no recourse to a labour exchange. But many will have little choice in the matter. Thus I anticipate a National Labour Exchange Year. It's just the kind of government-sponsored PR that could take our minds off the real issues.
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