Orders of the Day — New Clause. — (Amendment as to disqualifications for receipt of benefit.)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at on 12 December 1929.

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Photo of Mr Thomas Shaw Mr Thomas Shaw , Preston

I am not going to quibble, but a great deal more than that was said. The position now is uneven. On the one side you have education, power, and the staff of a huge Government Department; and on the other side the workman. The picture is out of perspective. If the words "not genuinely seeking work" could be consistently and properly applied, I myself might regard the Clause as being unnecessary; but during these discussions the hon. Member for Grimsby (Mr. Womersley) has produced a handful of bill headings from different firms showing that one of his own constituents had been to firm after firm, had literally forced his way into the offices, and had received documents from all these firms to prove that he had been genuinely seeking work, and still was turned down on the ground that he was not genuinely seeking work.

These words have been so interpreted that I am inevitably led to the conclusion that the only way to deal with a man and to give him a real chance is to give him the benefit of the doubt. The insurance officer will not be long without information if there is what is colloquially termed "a wrong un" about. If the insurance officer has reason to suspect that efforts to get work are not being made, he has the power to see that efforts are made. The Clause is generous, I agree, and it ought to be generous; it says that the man must be given the benefit of the doubt. The experience of the last four and a-half or five years has gone to prove that unless the man gets the benefit of the doubt he will not get justice. There is not a Member of this House who, with those four words "not genuinely seeking work" before him, would take away the benefit from a man who could prove that he had been seeking work. Then look at the ridiculousness of the position.

Let me give an instance of what occurs. Take the case of a Lancashire manufacturing town. Everyone who has lived in such a town will know that what I am saying is correct. Every mill in a depressed state of trade has its waiting list. As a rule, or in 99 per cent. of the cases, workers are taken on in turn. If a man is not there he misses his turn. If he walks from firm to firm he never will get work. I appeal to the House to give us the Clause. It may be giving a man the benefit of the doubt, but if it does that it is time he had it. There never will be any satisfactory conclusion to this matter until vacancies are notify-able by employers to Employment Exchanges. The Employment Exchanges grew up in an atmosphere of distrust. The good employer never needed to ask them for a workman, for there was always a workman available and there was never a decent working man who needed to go to an Exchange, because he could get a job without it. We had the extraordinary position, then, of the best employers and workmen both looking upon the Employment Exchange as something inferior that ought to be shunned. That is the difficulty that we have had to fight our way through. But those days are past. I believe that this Clause will finally bring to a head what many of us have been thinking for some years past—the question as to whether vacancies should not always be notify-able so that it can he known with definiteness and accuracy whether jobs are vacant or not.