obviously a matter of first importance for efficient production, will 
be hampered in some way if the employer has recourse to the 
employment exchanges. This is not so. There is no obligation 
on any employer to take any men submitted to him by the employ- 
ment exchange or indeed any particular man. What the exchanges 
do is to make available for selection by the employer or his fore- 
man a much wider field of accessible and suitable candidates than 
can be obtained by any other agency, and the more they are 
entrusted by employers with the task of initial selection, the more 
accurately will they respond to the employers’ requirements. 
Already some of the largest employers in the country, employing 
men of all degrees of skill, regularly look to the exchanges to make 
the initial selection of labour for them. The more this practical 
method is adopted, the sooner can be brought into productive 
employment many of the men of first-class quality now in the 
depressed areas and dependent mainly upon the exchanges in those 
areas for their contact with other areas where employment is more 
active. 
56. The exchanges, however, are not yet making the contribu- 
tion of which they are capable, partly because employers have 
refrained from using them for various reasons, of which the chief, 
we are satisfied, is because the facilities they offer are not fully 
understood, and partly because, occupied as they have been ever 
since 1920 in administering the complicated and ever-changing 
scheme of unemployment insurance, they have not been able to 
devote to the employment agency side of their work the full 
attention which it merits, and have failed to advertise effectively 
this aspect of their activity. It is clearly of the first importance 
that the Ministry of Labour should continue to develop with 
all the means at their disposal the employment agency side 
of the employment exchange activities; and they should consider 
wider and more effective publicity to make known to employers 
the facilities they offer than they have used in the past. 
57. We are not concerned to propose a fuller use of the employ- 
ment exchanges merely because they are a Government institution. 
But the present unemployment in the coal industry and one or 
two other industries involves a heavy financial burden upon the 
country as a whole to which industry is required to contribute. 
This burden cannot be appreciably lessened unless other industries 
will co-operate, and to make that co-operation effective the 
exchanges offer a means which cannot be found in any other agency. 
Whatever value may be attached to training as an aid to transfer, 
and we attach a high value, still it is by means of direct transfer 
without training that movement from one area to another must, 
in the main, take place if it is to be on a scals commensurate with 
the problem. And we look to the employment exchanges to play 
an important part in initiating and making possible through their 
widespread organisation movements of labour of this kind.