6   
Occupational Readjustment: Placement, Guidance, And Training Facilities

The second positive measure which is needed in a full-employment programme is a system of facilities which will help to equip people to find work, or to give them access to new skills if there are no openings for those they already possess.

It is impossible to overemphasize the significance of the Dominion Employment Service as the agency for the development and coordination of these functions. The reorganization of the Service on a national basis was a big step forward, made possible by the amendment to the British North America Act in 1940. It implemented, incidentally, one of the most emphatic recommendations of the National Employment Commission of 1936–7. Under heavy war pressures in the administration of National Selective Service and manpower mobilization orders, valuable experience has been gained, and the Employment Offices should be much better equipped than ever before to play their basic part in the redirection of workers who have to find new jobs in the peacetime economy. It is still necessary, however, not to lose sight of the fact that labour market organization in the post-war period will demand personnel of the highest calibre, nationally and regionally.

The manner in which the functions of the Employment Service grow ever more important with extensions in the social insurance structure, also their special role in the future of unemployment assistance organization, no matter what strengthening of the unemployment insurance system may be undertaken, will be made clear by other sections of this report. Furthermore, a positive and constructive approach to social security legislation will require the development of rehabilitation measures as well as placement facilities, and various elaborations of the concept of vocational guidance as applied on a mass scale. These will call for co-operative effort between government and industry, ingenuity in the development of training and educational techniques, the harnessing of administrative science to mundane and “practical” situations, of which there are now many wartime examples, but which will have to be worked out anew for the problems of peace.

To elaborate on this modernized concept of placement work as it may be performed through the Employment Service would take this text too far from the immediate purpose of the report. A special word is necessary, however, on the role of training schemes, both in relation to the post-war period, and as part of a comprehensive social insurance scheme.

Recognition of the need for a variety of training facilities, adapted to the realities of the labour market and to the wide range of educational inequalities, has been slow in Canada, though accelerated markedly by the distress and pressures of the pre-war depression years. Most of the reasons for the need are not the product of depression conditions, but of long-run deficiencies. The large proportion of unskilled workers on the unemployment relief rolls gave emphasis to the need, however; so also did the growing problems of youths who were unable to find employment after leaving school. Other reasons which still remain are the inefficient articulation of technical school facilities with the elementary educational system, and with industrial demands, in almost all the provinces of Canada; continuous changes in the technology of industry itself; the need of agriculture for an increasing leaven of science and technical training in its personnel, if it is to retain its reserves of youthful labour and improve its efficiency.

Apart altogether from the intensification of these needs in the post-war period, training facilities have a special and constructive relationship to unemployment insurance. For many categories of workers the proper requisite in the event of unemployment is not maintenance in idleness, or even employment on works projects, but training. British experience has developed several types, all of them supplementary to the regular educational system – schemes concentrating on physical rehabilitation, courses giving a general acquaintance with tools and factory techniques; more elaborate training in specific crafts; projects in “continued” (or dovetailed) education. In the United States, special prominence has been accorded the technique of the Civilian Conservation Corps, which combines physical fitness and open-air programmes, supplementary education, and training in conservation methods and in appreciation of the value of natural resources. In Canada this particularly useful supplement to labour market organization was emulated (in the form of the National Forestry Project) on only a small scale; but the youth training programmes, starting with only a few hundreds in 1937, have been greatly expanded in size and experience since the youth training schemes became the War Emergency Training Programme covering pre-employment training of all kinds, for adults as well as youths.

Attendance at courses of instruction is already written into the Canadian unemployment insurance Act as one of the statutory conditions for the receipt of benefit; it would obviously be even more relevant for workers who have exhausted their benefit rights, or who for other reasons apply for unemployment assistance (Sections 7, 8). In any case, training should be brought into operation for all unskilled workers, particularly if they are still young, as soon as they show lengthy unemployment records (if they do not apply for training voluntarily); for an improvement in what they have to offer an employer is their only hope, in normal times, of getting better paid or more regular work. “Training benefit,” in the form of a maintenance rate payable only on the condition that appropriate training courses are taken, has been suggested as an apposite provision for the normally self-employed and other non-wage-earners who would not be eligible for ordinary unemployment benefits. It has been proposed also as a requisite for the receipt of a widow’s pension if the woman has no children or is below a certain maximum age (say 50) and has reasonable prospects of becoming self-supporting. Special vocational instruction and placement arrangements are already being organized for war casualties. There is no reason why similar provisions for physically handicapped civilian workers should not be extended on a national basis; and this will in fact be specifically desirable in the advent of a disability pensions scheme. The training or retraining of middle-aged and older workers which amounts to rehabilitation is perhaps the most difficult; indeed, it is impossible without specialized attention and “case work,” and the cooperative goodwill of employers. It would obviously not be profitable in a depression situation, in which jobs were hard to find even for the skilled and physically fit. But this is equally true of any training programme, whether for youth, for returned soldiers, or for war workers adapting themselves to peacetime enterprises. Training programmes are critically dependent on success in the economic branches of “full employment” policy. But the dependence is reciprocal: the best policies of monetary and fiscal adjustment, national works programmes, and industrial and agricultural reorganization, cannot be fully implemented unless the machinery for a flexible redirection of labour is also set in motion. A half-hearted approach to either would be equally detrimental to both. The obvious requirement is that placement and training programmes and plans for economic expansion should be built side by side.

It is not necessary to emphasize further the crucial importance of turning the fullest resources of training and re-training to the problem of occupational transference immediately the need for war production is ended. Fortunately, Canada starts off with certain assets in this field. The enhanced range of pre-employment classes, accelerated teaching for skilled men in the armed services, supervisory training schemes, spare-time vocational education courses, can be examined for adaptation to post-war use. The rehabilitation machinery (under P.C. 7633) provides a strong framework for men who wish to extend their training or education after demobilization. Above all, the Vocational Training Coordination Act, passed in 1942, provides a basis and an opportunity for a co-operative programme of courses and projects on a national scale, if its facilities get the response they deserve.

In immediate preparation, however, there is still much to be done. It is not at all certain, for example, that the capacity and equipment of our existing technical schools is sufficient to meet the heavy demands which will be made upon them in the first post-war years. Again one of the specific problems of administration which has to be carefully envisaged and worked out – as far as possible, before the end of the war – is the proper relation between training projects under the Vocational Training Act, present apprenticeship conditions, regular technical school facilities, and the contributions which management and workers in wartime plants can make by looking ahead themselves. All this involves responsibilities for the Employment Service and requires a strengthening of its resources if it is to act, through its national machinery and its local committees, as a coordinator. The Committee on Reconstruction has received reports on several of these topics from one of its subcommittees. Because placement and training facilities have become so generally recognized to-day as an integral part of constructive social security measures in the employment field, some of the most relevant recommendations of the subcommittee referred to are reproduced in Appendix IV. It is of interest, also, to precede these with the official statement of the policy of the Employment Service, as set out in the first report of the Unemployment Insurance Commission.