§ Motion made, and Question proposed, "That this House do now adjourn."—[Major Sir James Edmondson.]
§ Mr. Henderson Stewart (Fife, East)I wish to raise the question of the threatened closure, under a Concentration Order, of the firm of Messrs. Scott and Fyfe's jute weaving mill in Tayport, Fife, about which I have addressed Questions to the Minister of Labour and the President of the Board of Trade. I had hoped to be able to avoid bringing this question to public notice, because I realise that there are questions of public security involved; but all my efforts to settle the matter behind the scenes has failed, and, as the subject is of vital concern to the life and livelihood of my constituents, I have no alternative but to bring it before the House, and to seek its justice. The jute industry, like many others, has been compelled to suffer contraction because of the needs of the war effort. Some time ago a first measure of contraction took place which proved insufficient, and a further instalment has been ordered. I do not contest the basic need of that step, although I have the gravest doubts of the wisdom of its direction, even in theory. But I am here to protest against the form which the new contraction has taken and the method adopted to carry it into effect.
It is on this point that I appeal for the sympathy and protection of the House. I do not know the extent of contraction decided upon. The concentration committee in Dundee declined to meet me or to provide any information to the Scottish Advisory Council of Industry set up by the Secretary of State for Scotland, and I do not fancy that my hon. and gallant Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade is going to give me any more information to-day, though he is chiefly responsible for the scheme. Nor have I any exact figures, because these too are wrapped in secrecy, of the extent to which the scheme of concentration is to be spread over the various towns and mills where jute is now spun or woven. But this I do know, that while many large weaving establishments will remain in operation in Dundee—that city of the jute baron's and that great trade union with whom they collaborate—the small town of Tayport—and there may well be other small towns 1122 similarly threatened—where there is neither big business nor big unions but only a small independent enterprise, the only weaving mill in existence has received sentence of execution. The weaving mill concerned has been established and has been working with scarcely a day's idleness for over 70 years. It is one of only two substantial work places giving employment to the 3,000 people in the town. It is therefore not only part and parcel of the community, but a vital element in their life. Close down the mill and you will rob the citizens of that town, the people immediately employed and all the humble merchants and tradesmen serving their needs, of the sure means of livelihood. If there is any doubt as to that, let the House look at the appeals made by the Fife County Council, the Tayport Town Council, the Scottish Advisory Council for Industry and the Scottish Office—all appeals addressed to the Board of Trade. Why is this mill closed down? Not because it is old-fashioned. It is very well situated for transport by road, rail and sea. It is much more modern in machinery and layout and has very much more harmonious relations with its workers than many of the mills on the other side of the Tay. It is not because it is inefficient or idle. On the contrary, it has competed, and has always successfully competed, with its rivals in the field in price and quality. It is and has always been busy, with its books well filled with orders, every one of these orders being for vital elements in war production.
Why then is this firm being concentrated? I have no difficulty in getting the official answer. It is, according to the Board of Trade, and the Jute Control in Dundee, to be closed because the looms now operated in the Tayport Mill are mostly of the 76-inch size, which cannot take two 40-inch widths. These, it is said, are too wide or too narrow for the bulk of the present requirements of Supply Departments. Therefore, says the President of the Board of Trade and his panzer division of controllers and committees and officials, the Tayport Mill must close. If that edict were to be made applicable universally throughout the jute trade, I admit that my case would be less strong than it is to-day. But I found on making inquiries in Dundee that there are many looms of exactly the same size, suffering apparently from exactly the 1123 same defects, still in operation and designated to remain in operation after this concentration scheme has been set going. I was not given the number of such looms. It would have been rather dangerous, I suppose, to make the figure public, but I am advised that the number is large. The Parliamentary Secretary may well reply that it is more economical, if certain types of looms are to be stopped, to stop them in large, blocks rather than in twos and three in different mills. But if that is his answer, I must ask him to tell the House how many large blocks of looms—shall we say 40 or over, as they have in Tayport—are still to be left running in big businesses in Dundee? I think he will find their number is still considerable. Why are these particular looms being left in Dundee? For the obvious reason that there is work for them. They will be performing exactly the same work which the Tayport Mill is performing to-day.
The truth is that this argument will not stand examination. Nor, I think, will the related argument with regard to labour. When I asked what was to become of the work-people who would be thrown into idleness as the result of the Tayport weaving mill being closed I was told that the bulk of them would be transferred to the neighbouring spinning mill, the only other substantial work-place in the town. The Board of Trade recognised, though the Concentration Committee did not, that without some alternative employment extreme hardship would be suffered by work-people in Tayport. And this was the alternative they offered me. I am neither comforted nor impressed by that answer. In the first place it takes time to make a weaver into a spinner. Weaving is an entirely different job from spinning. Middle-aged women—and it is those for whom I am principally speaking to-day—do not readily, pick up a new technique, to make it pay a fair wage. When I was in Dundee during the week-end I asked a member of the official committee of the industry which is dealing with the training of labour how long it would take to make a weaver into an efficient spinner. This man, with his profound experience, told me that it would take a year or longer.
What is the value to the national effort of a transfer of labour when it takes such a long time to become efficient? In the meantime that labour, being inefficient, will have to suffer considerable wage 1124 reductions from its present scale. Is that fair? I do not think it is.
There is another reason. The assumption underlying the closure of the weaving mill at Tayport and the transfer of its workers is that there is a surplus of weavers at the present time. That was the explanation given to me in all official circles, so far as I can recall. It is a false assumption and is wholly disproved by the facts. I wonder if the Parliamentary Secretary knows that an official committee of the jute industry is taking steps at this very moment to train additional weavers, scores of them? Is he unaware that every store and warehouse in Dundee is almost chock full of yarn, the product of the spinners and the raw material of the weavers? It is not less weaving we need but more weaving, much more, to use up the great surplus of yarn which the Jute Control have been purchasing in recent times. That yarn is useless in its present form for war purposes, but woven into materials it is of priceless value to the Air Ministry, the Supply Ministry, the Ministry of Fuel and Power and other Departments dealing with the prosecution of the war.
Seeing these conditions, is it any wonder that my constituents lift a rather querulous eyebrow when they are told to give up weaving for the safe alternative of spinning? What assurance is there, what assurance can be given to me who represent them here, that, having transferred these workers to the spinning mill, that very mill will not be under the hammer of closure within a very short time? That is the question my constituents are asking, and I confess I see no sure answer to it. Is it surprising that, in these circumstances, they ask, "Can those Ministers in London be serious in the step they are now taking? Can they know what it is they are doing?" That is why I challenge not only the method but the very purpose of this new concentration scheme. I believe it to be thoroughly unsound. The Jute Control have already had to admit a mistake in the assessment of needs. I would advise the President of the Board of Trade to have them on the mat, because I think he will find they have blundered again.
I am anxious that my hon. and gallant Friend should have an opportunity of replying and I will not detain the House 1125 many more minutes, but I invite my hon. and gallant Friend to consult his hon. Friend who represents the Ministry of Labour before he carries this scheme through to a conclusion. I very much doubt whether the Ministry of Labour can possibly support the present scheme. I would offer my hon. and gallant Friend a hint on the present situation. It is a most striking example of the left hand of officialdom not knowing what the right hand is doing. I am informed that if the workers displaced in Tayport cannot find alternative employment there, they are to be transferred to the new war factories being built up in Dundee. When I heard that I gasped. What does it mean? When these new factories are in operation they will require, I gather, 5,000 more workers than Dundee itself can possibly supply. To meet that need the Ministry of Labour will have to scour the whole of the surrounding districts for new man-power and woman-power. But why ask them to take on that difficulty job? Why not ease the problem? If instead of jute labour in Tayport, additional jute labour in Dundee were released, would not some at least of the new labour required for these great factories be available on the spot, living in their own homes, going back to their own fire-places at night, and thus saving lengthy, expensive transport day by day? Would it not be infinitely more economical and sensible to leave the hundred, because that is all that is involved—the hundred skilled weavers in Tayport—at their present work instead of carrying them by train to and from Dundee every day to do work which they do not understand? I gather that 3,000 jute workers in Dundee are to be released under the present scheme, not many in proportion to the total number of jute workers in that great jute city. Would it upset the scheme very much if one hundred were added to the 3,000, the hundred from Dundee who could be taken so easily, instead of the hundred from Tayport, whose going will smash a vital industry in that town? That is the solution which I fancy every sensible man would suggest and which I rather think the Ministry of Labour would probably support.
I have said enough to show that this whole scheme of concentration deserves reconsideration. As it stands at present, it is unsound from the point of view of jute production, it is uneconomical in the use 1126 of labour and transport, it is grossly unjust to small enterprises and their workers situated in outlying towns, whose dispersed position, one would have thought, would have been an asset in the middle of a war. It is criticised by every expert in the industry, other than officials, whom I have consulted, and in the small towns which it is designed to penalise in the cruellest manner possible by killing for ever their staple industry, it has raised more ill feeling and resentment than I have ever known. I ask the President of the Board of Trade, who is the advocate and planner of the new order, to start doing now what is right by the people over whom he is for the moment set to govern. I ask him to cancel the closing of this small but vigorous enterprise in Tayport.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade (Captain Waterliouse)I have little complaint to make about the way the hon. Member has presented his case, but I do not at all agree with his concluding sentences, in which he roundly denounced the whole scheme. He referred earlier to the panzer divisions of the Board of Trade which were sweeping over and through the jute industry. If, indeed, the armour is the armour of the Board of Trade, the personnel is the personnel of the industry itself, because this is not a scheme made in London, either in the Board of Trade or the Ministry of Labour. It is a scheme made by a Committee of members of the industry elected from that industry by ballot, and I do not think that the hon. Member, with all his zeal for the jute industry, could devise a better means for attempting to arrive at a solution. What he said about the history of the industry is perfectly true. There was a first concentration scheme this spring which arose from arrangements that had been made in the preceding autumn. Changes in the Far East made it seem probable that the amount of jute that we should get would be materially less than before. It was, therefore, decided that the industry should be reconcentrated. The reconcentration scheme is to take effect by the second week in this month. It differs from the last scheme in this way. In the last there is a pro rata cutting down over all sections of the industry, but with this further concentration it became necessary to cut out the less essential sections altogether. We have found it necessary 1127 to shut down the carpet industry completely. Therefore no jute is needed for that. The linoleum industry is also being definitely curtailed. In both those directions, therefore, the main cuts have to take place and it was necessary to select certain sections of the industry for much more drastic cuts than others.
As always in these concentration schemes, when an industry comes to be reviewed it can be readily seen that certain factories must remain in existence, and for perfectly good reasons, connected with the Ministry of Labour or the Ministry of Supply or the consumption of fuel or transport, others clearly have to be closed. The closing of any firm is hard, but, when there is a clear-cut case which can be made, the blow, though hard, can be better borne. Between those two there are always a certain number of firms about which there is doubt, and I freely admit that this is one. It is a marginal case. Should Messrs. Scott and Fyfe's works at Tayport be allowed to run or should they be forced to close? In arriving at that decision, the Committee had to take certain facts into consideration. The first, as my hon. Friend has truly said, was that of machinery. They have 161 looms; 88 of these are suitable to our present purposes and 73 are unsuitable. Therefore, at best only about 60 per cent. of the machinery of this works could be run economically, because I do not agree with my hon. Friend in saying that it is better to weave the jute into cloth than leave it in the yarn if when woven the fabric is not needed.
§ Captain WaterhouseIf we were to carry out the regulation of industry upon the number of orders that people can get for civilian needs, industry would now be booming, but that is not the case. The next consideration we had to take in mind was the operatives. There are 117 operatives in this firm, which, as my hon. Friend pointed out, is a highly reputable firm. It is one of those firms which are the backbone of the smaller industries of the British Isles. There are 86 women and 31 men. Of this total 1128 there are 18 men and 31 women who, could be called to the Forces. There are eight who are mobile and could be sent away by my right hon. Friend the Minister of Labour. There remain 47 women and 13 men who are immobile; that is to say, who are so fixed that their domicile could not be moved, although they could be moved across the county to any place within reasonable travelling distance of their homes.
Weighing these various factors, the Trade Committee came to the decision that the works should close. On the other hand, it has been found—I will not say since been found, but these factors do come to light, and I am not sure whether they were in the mind of the Committee or not—that there are material difficulties in transport between Tayport and Dundee and in transferring these operatives into Cupar, because the work available there is a rather different grade. With these various considerations in our mind, and after discussing the matter with my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour, we have taken the view that, whatever happens, the people liable for the Forces and the mobile labour must be withdrawn from this firm. In view, however, of what I have said about the difficulty of the employment of the immobile labour, we are prepared to examine this point. I hope that my hon. Friend will think that that is going a long way to meet the very understandable wishes of this firm.
§ Captain WaterhouseNo firm likes to be closed down—we appreciate that—and for the time being the firm will not be asked to close down in the middle of this month. At that time the Ministry of Labour will be able to withdraw any labour it can use elsewhere, and the firm will be allowed to carry on with its immobile labour pending further consideration by the Trade Committee which we have set up for this purpose.
§ Question, "That this House do now adjourn," put, and agreed to.