Australia's Boldest Experiment by Stuart MacIntyre

Author:Stuart MacIntyre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2015-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

Demobilisation was the first of the steps that Trevor Swan identified at the end of hostilities and he thought it would require measures to guard against the ‘immediate displacement consequences’. The calculations of manpower that he performed for the War Commitments Committee were applied during the preparation of the White Paper on Full Employment to produce statistical projections of expenditure, production and employment during the transition period; they suggested it would take time to absorb the 600 000 members of the armed forces and the 200 000 employed in war industries. That was one reason for staging the discharge across the best part of 12 months and for the same reason it was decided to taper off war production rather than bring it to a sudden halt, lest the labour market be flooded with munition workers.

The fear of unemployment lay dormant during the war. It revived at war’s end, and with it the memories of the humiliation and hardship that had soured the 1930s. A poll conducted in September 1945 asked Australians what they thought about the prospects of employment ‘in the next few years’; only 31 per cent expected there would be jobs for all, with 39 per cent anticipating some unemployment and 28 per cent fearing it would be extensive.19

The fears proved groundless. Of 435 000 demobilisation forms collected by the Re-establishment Division up to June 1946, 336 000 recorded immediate placement in employment. Another 57 000 had deferred placement – presumably they included those soldiers who landed at Sydney in September 1945 – while others were training, did not seek work or were prevented from doing so by disabilities. Just 22 000 of those wishing to rejoin the workforce were not placed within a fortnight of discharge and it was clear that the great majority of them had since found work as only 6800 persons were on unemployment benefit. It was the same with the war workers. Anticipating that as many as 60 000 of these would be displaced, the government provided a special transition allowance to supplement their unemployment benefit, but the numbers claiming it were negligible.20

Far from a surplus of labour, there was a shortage – the Commonwealth Employment Service recorded unfilled vacancies for 22 000 men and 31 000 women in June 1946. While the shortages included some types of skilled labour, they were most pronounced in manual occupations that called for ‘heavy and unpleasant work’. In the case of men these included mining, building and construction, and the production of building materials such as bricks, tiles and timber; apart from the consequences for the housing program, the short supply in these basic industries created bottlenecks in the rest of the economy. The vacancies for women were in textiles, food processing, laundries and other traditionally female occupations.

The shortfall of women was greater because they were leaving the workforce. In the last year of the war there were 745 000 in civilian occupations and 46 000 in the forces. Two years later the number employed had fallen to 639 00.

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