Mr. Wilson's Shake-out

from an industrial correspondent. A survey published in Monday's Daily Mail shows that Mr. Wilson's "shake out" is merely shaking people out of well-paid jobs into either low-paid ones or the dole queue. We have extracted parts of this survey: "The Newsight inquiry showed that relatively few jobs await the 12,000 BMC workers at anything like their former pay. The Ministry of Labour's huge rescue operation, mounted to provide the sacked men with work, is offering them such jobs as coalmen, shirt salesmen, postmen and ambulance and bus drivers. This is a far cry from Mr, Wilson's promised "shake-out" to make industry more efficient, provide men for labour-hungry exporters and help Britain pay her way. "Many firms are not keen to employ the semi-skilled car workers, who had been averaging £25 a week, They know that men who were lured to the car assembly tracks by high earnings are likely to be attracted back again at the first opportunity. The Ministry, which has written to every firm in the Brimingham area with more than 20 employees, will arnounce on Thursday its up-to-date total of jobs avails able for the car workers. They are to be sacked on November 4, "The mathematics of the crisis in the Midlands is simple. There are 11,914 car workers to be found new jobs - and they include 992 women. When the crisis began there were sunposed to be 37,785 jobs vacant. But let us look more closely at these vacant jobs. First, 8,962 are for women, and 13,489 for youngsters under 18, Second, the 15,334 jobs vacant for men are spread across five counties, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Herefordshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire. This is an area of 5,000 square miles. Some jobs would be inaccessible to a man in a Birmingham suburb, possibly a 60 mile drive away. The 15,000 jobs listed as available can be broken down into these categories: 900 in agriculture and mining (national average pay £13.16s in agriculture, £21,12s in mining); 1,700 in construction (£19.19s); 2,2) in transport (£20.68); 1,100 in public services such as gas and electricity (£18.17s); " and "6,000 in engineering (£20.11s). ‘The other vacant jobs are a mixture ranging from hotel porter to prison officer, "A big proportion of the engineering jobs are not open to the sacked men, who were highly paid rather than highly skilled (9,000 rank as semi-skilled, and 1,000 as un-skilled). The 1,400 skilled men being sacked will be quickly snapped up. ‘The others would be no help to the firms which filled two pages of the Coventry Evening Telegraph with display advertisements for such jobs as skilled fitters, millers and horizontal borers. "The Ministry has drafted 70 volunteer officials into Birmingham to cope with the crisis. They work hard - mostly from 9 a.m. to nidnight - interviewing the streams of workers who have been told they will be laid off, Each morning a van from the Ministry's Birmingham headquarters carries batches of green cards in metal trays to the emergency centres. These are the latest jobs available. "The interviewers know many of the men they see go away dissatisfied. All the men to whom Newsight spoke were disillusioned. Many complained that the help given was "bloody umeless"..."a dead loss"..."hopeless, not worth coming down for..." A bitter joke about the Ministry's job-list is already circulating the Midlands, It has Mr, Ray Gunter, the Labour Minister, addressing the men thus: ‘I have some important news, the first part is bad, the second, good. The bad news is thet there aren't any more highly paid jobs for you car workers, only rotten, badly paid jobs. The good news is that there are plenty of rotten badly paid jobs.’ "