Events | 2010.01.30
Exhibition celebrates 100 years of job centres
Winston Churchill was behind the first labour exchanges, which opened on 1 February 1910, and a new exhibition in Hackney, London, celebrates their history
There were just 62 labour exchanges when they were first introduced on 1 February, 1910. Then, children left school at 12 and domestic service was the most common occupation. Jobs for a piano regulator and a picture frame gilder were among those advertised in the Shoreditch office in east London on the first day.
One hundred years later, the labour exchange has transformed into Jobcentre Plus, with 750 offices and 78,000 employees, and jobs on offer for fraud investigators and graphic designers.
Tomorrow, to mark the 100th anniversary of their introduction by Winston Churchill, then the president of the board of trade, an exhibition will open in London that outlines a history that began with women and men walking through separate entrances, the skilled and unskilled being kept apart and "juveniles" as young as 11 queueing for work.
Memorabilia will be used to show how the first recruitment drive saw 20,000 people apply for posts. Those looking for work would go to abandoned offices, disused factories, shops and even chapels that had been converted into the original job centres. It was the start of a process that would go on to match millions of workers with employers through two world wars, the Great Depression, a social revolution, a technological boom and the latest financial crash.
Much of the material to go on show at the Hackney Museum was collected by Collin Crooks, a civil servant who used to work as a records officer for the employment service. He saved much of the memorabilia from being thrown away by taking pieces out of skips. "I found a nice enamel sign in a skip that said: \'Prevention of consumption – do not spit\'," he said.
Other items found by Crooks include an original table from 1910 and a number of posters. Crooks has written a historical booklet about the first 100 years of the employment service.
One man who witnessed the changes first-hand is Peter Coote, 64. He worked at employment exchanges from 1964 until 2005. "My first job was on men\'s vacancies and I remember it was busy, noisy and smoky," said Coote, who said staff and customers would smoke throughout interviews.
"Looking back, the conditions were quite poor and primitive. On the customer side, the floors were paved; there was no technology except a telephone; and if you wanted to copy something you used carbon paper."
Coote, who lives in Doncaster, remembers that many coming into the exchange would not have a home phone. "By the time we had written to them, the vacancy was gone," he added.
The exchanges got their first upgrade during Coote\'s time in 1965, when interviewing cubicles were introduced with wooden, swing doors. "They were pretty claustrophobic and we called them traps." He had some minimal training in "industrial and occupational knowledge", which involved going to a steel works in Rotherham.
It was in the 1970s that the exchanges were given their distinctive black-and-yellow look, added Coote. The decade also saw the start of more serious training for interviewers: "We were taught about eye contact, body language and how to structure the advice."
Today, the dole has been renamed jobseeker\'s allowance. Last week marked the start of a new service whereby jobseekers aged between 18 and 24 will be offered work, work experience or training if they are still out of work after six months.
The exhibition opening tomorrow, 100 Years and Counting: Helping People into Work Since 1910 , is being organised by the Department of Work and Pensions, of which Jobcentre Plus is a part. Jim Knight, the employment minister, said there had been huge changes as a result of equality legislation. He described how in the past some vacancies would say "no coloured people" or would be for only men or women.
"The most significant change apart from that is to bring together the benefits and the job search, and saying it is a system where you get something for something," said Knight. "You get money as long as you are looking for work and you have to come in fortnightly to show you are serious about finding it."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jan/31/100-years-of-job-centres
Instagram is adding automatic in-app text translation - The Verge views: 1529
Here’s a ‘Brand-New’ Massive Multilingual Dataset for Machine Translation views: 1526