ENG-1966 — Page 54

EMPLOYMENT

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vouchers from local Commonwealth citizens seeking to enter Britain for employment but without specific jobs to go to. During the year, nine such applications were received and sent to the Ministry of Labour, and five vouchers were issued. At the request of the Ministry of Labour, the Labour Department also undertook to deliver 124 (compared with 415 in the previous year) ‘Category A' vouchers issued under the Commonwealth Immigrants Act to local people of British nationality who had been offered specific jobs in Britain. The Ministry of Labour also issued 397 labour permits to local residents of non-British nationality to enable them to work in Britain, mainly in Chinese restaurants.

The employment information service, set up in August 1964 to disseminate information about vacant jobs, continued with its rudimentary placement service during the first half of the year. To provide a better service for both employers and workers, this service was slowly expanded during the year to fulfil some basic functions of an employment exchange, including the introduction of registered job-seekers to prospective employers and vice versa. Since its inception this expanded service has registered 1,355 workers and received from employers 138 orders for workers. During 1966, 287 workers were placed. In addition to dealing with specific requests from employers, the service collects quarterly statistics, on a purely voluntary basis, of vacant jobs in registered factories and industrial undertakings.

It is reliably estimated that some 43,000 seamen of Chinese race, many of them resident in Hong Kong, find employment at sea in various trades. Many of these, however, are nationals of China. The newly established seamen's recruiting office, which became fully operational as part of the Marine Department on 27th June 1966, succeeded in placing 16,201 seamen up to the end of the year.

Although no comprehensive figures on unemployment are available, the substantial increase in the number of people employed in registered and recorded factories and industrial undertakings since 1961 suggests that at present the number of unemployed may not be any greater than that at the time of the 1961 census, when less than 16,000 persons, mostly men, claimed to be unemployed and an additional 5,000 stated that they were looking for their first jobs.