The action of one of the foremost British undertakings in changing the former system of employment to direct employment is one of the significant happenings of the year under report. In the Spring the initial effort was made in the smallest or the three mills of the company, and was accompanied by two strikes. The company persisted, however, and was finally successful in replacing the former system by one in- which labour manager, an employee of the company, took charge of employment matters, The hostilities, which interrupted the activities of the re. maining two mills of the company for several months, made the occasion for a similar change in these enterprises, By advertisement in the Chinese press on November 1, the company made public its new policy.
There remains for owner; of mills to take steps to see that, in so far as they are able to control the situation, do not employ in their undertakings workers who are in the control of middlemen and who do apprenticeship which is, in effect, unpaid child labour.
Here again a middleman often profits: he induce the parents of a child in the country to permit him to find employment for the child in the city, ud an employer in need of assist-will remunerate the entreprenour.
The child henceforth is at the disposal of the factory owner, and some of the results of confined employment are long hours.of work, inadequate food, and fatigue which arises from bad sleeping accommodation.
The Engineering Society of China, in its concern for the raising of the standards of workmanship in enggineering and allied trades, undertook in 1937 an examination of the whole question of apprenticeship as existing in China and present practice abroad. It is expected that the report when issued will form a most useful do-cement designed to promote the attainment of genuine skills through adequate training both practical and theoretical At the same time a clear line of demarcation should be drawn between bona fide apprentices who, because they are being taught skills, are rightly not in receipt of wages, and those who, contributing to the production of goods, are entitled to payment for services, The Chinese Government Factory' Act contains clauses which apply to "hsueh t'u" apprentices, but there is no definition of the trades to which apprentices may be put term used is a general one covering the young person learning crafts, the boys who work in a shop or laundry, and those who are employed under contract at purely repetitive processes in small factories. The law should refuse to recognise contracts which bind young workers to employers to the one-sided advantage of the latter, except in cases of bong fide apprenticeships. The problem is a complex one. But it would appear that it should be possible to find in so large a city as Shanghai sufficient young labour for the tasks to be performed by it, without the importation from the country of lads who become the virtual slaves of employers. The boy worker who returns home each night and has the advantage of outside contacts, is less easily exploitable.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.