FOOTNOTES: 

[14] Otherwise called “The Trade Boards Bill.”

LABOUR EXCHANGES AND UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE

HOUSE OF COMMONS, May 19, 1909

The functions of Government in relation to industrial life may be divided into three categories—­discipline, organisation, and relief.  The control and regulation of industrial conditions by penal and disciplinary powers belong to the Home Office, the relieving and curative processes are entrusted to the Local Government Board, and the organisation of industry falls to the province of the Board of Trade.  The proposals which I now submit to the House are concerned only with organisation; they can be judged only in relation to that section of the subject; they do not pretend to stretch beyond it, or to include other not less important aspects; and I ask that they shall not be impugned, because, in dealing with the evils which properly fall within that sphere, they do not extend to other evils that lie without it.

I ask permission to introduce a Bill for the establishment of a national system of Labour Exchanges.  There is high authority for this proposal.  The Majority and Minority representatives of the Poor Law Commission, differing in so much else, are agreed unanimously in its support.  “In the forefront of our proposals,” says the Majority Report, “we place Labour Exchanges.”  “This National Labour Exchange,” says the Minority Report, “though in itself no adequate remedy, is the foundation of all our proposals.  It is, in our view, an indispensable condition of any real reform.”  The National Conference of Trade Union Delegates, convened by the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress, of March 19, 1909, resolved unanimously:  “That this Conference of Trade Union delegates, representing 1,400,000 members, approves of the establishment of Labour Exchanges on a national basis, under the control of the Board of Trade, provided that the managing board contains at least an equal proportion of employers and representatives of Trade Unions.”  The Central Unemployed Body for London, by a Resolution in June 1908, declared in favour of a national system of Labour Exchanges.  Economists as divergent in opinion as Professor Ashley, of Birmingham, and Professor Chapman, of Manchester, have all approved and urged the project publicly in the strongest terms.  Several of the principal members of the late Government have, either in evidence before the Poor Law Commission or in public speeches, expressed themselves in favour of Labour Exchanges, and the Report of the delegates of the Labour Party to Germany strongly approves of the system which they found there, namely:  “the co-ordination and systematic management of Public Labour Exchanges.”