Boy life & labour : the manufacture of inefficiency / by Arnold Freeman.

  • Arnold Freeman
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Boy life & labour : the manufacture of inefficiency / by Arnold Freeman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/276 (page 7)
    It is the common practice in Birmingham for all but the “ superior ” boys to change their jobs frequently.1 The “ superior ” boy (usually making for the highly- paid and better-class manual work) tends to remain in one job or change but rarely. By taking all boys with four or more jobs to their record, I therefore excluded this class. But I included, as will be seen,2 a certain pro- portion of boys who were wastrels; boys with an abnormally nomadic industrial career; and therefore not typical of boys as a whole. Boys employed as street-traders and in casual ways were excluded by reason of the fact that such lads have no need of, and do not use, the Exchange. The bulk of the boys selected are, I believe, typical of the mass of uneducative Boy Labour in Birmingham, which enlists the services of well above half and probably about three-quarters of all the juvenile population.3 To what extent they are really representative will be more clearly shown by the chapters immediately sub- sequent to this ; and the reader will be able to judge for himself from the data presented. In the later chapters I have been careful to attempt no generalisa- tions, which depend for their validity on the precise composition of this sample. traceable owing to the disappearance of the family from the only known address ; in several cases the school teacher could give me no record of the boy at school. 1 This Change of Jobs is apparently characteristic of every large centre of industry, and has been too little considered in works on Boy Labour. Its examination was made a special feature of this investigation (see pp. 199-205). 2 Chapter IV. 3 Chapters II., III. and IV. Cf. foregoing quotations, p. 3. It is almost impossible to state the exact proportion, because of the difficulty alluded to on p. 10 of defining “ skilled ” and “ unskilled ” ; and also because no precise statistics exist. The point is fully considered in Chapter VIII. on Industrial Conditions. Mr. Tawney refers to these boys as “ the large class of boys who are neither learners nor apprentices, and, who, though they are often overlooked, constitute at once by far the most serious part of the problem of Boy Labour ” (Memorandum appended to the Report of the Consultative Committee, Vol. I. p. 308).