“Socially necessary” work was to be provided for all. This was to be facilitated by the withdrawal of juvenile labour, and the general introduction of a 44-hour week without reduction of wages, coupled with a drastic regulation of overtime. The work so provided should not be “relief works,” but of a “socially productive character” carried out under regular wage-earning employment by workpeople in the appropriate trades. Work merely providing employment for the unemployed without social results was characterized as wasteful for the community and demoralizing to the workers. The Labour Party tries of set policy to make the Government the scapegoat; so the Report delivered itself as follows: “We recognize that the insensate policy of the Government during the last two years both in home and foreign affairs has brought the nation to the point at which wholesale relief is the only alternative to wholesale starvation, and that those who suffer by it must be provided for directly out of the pockets of those more fortunately situated.” In order to increase the volume of employment the Government was enjoined to put in hand, at once, as much as possible of its works programme for the next decade, and cause commodities ultimately needed by the State to be manufactured forthwith; and local authorities and public bodies were similarly called upon to anticipate their requirements. Road improvements were demanded on a much larger scale, and afforestation and foreshore reclamation. Then came the recommendation that the Government should compose its differences with the Building Trade Unions by giving them a guarantee of an adequate minimum housing programme for the next five years, so as to meet “their reasonable claim for safeguards against unemployment”—this to induce the Building Trade Unions, who had more housing work than they could do, to allow unemployed unskilled men, mainly ex-service men, to enter temporarily the building trade! The report alleged that many raw materials and other necessary supplies were being held up by capitalists, for instance, cement, bricks, light castings; to remedy this supposititious state of affairs the Government was urged to take drastic steps to compel the production of these materials in the required quantities. An enormous amount of work in respect of the construction, improvement and repair of railways, roads, waterways and harbours, it was said, ought no longer to be postponed. Schools and other public buildings should be built. The embargoes laid upon borrowing by local authorities should be removed and loans provided for them through the Public Works Commissioners or otherwise by the State to enable them to carry out local public works. The Government was required to resume through county agricultural committees its war-time powers to enforce the proper cultivation of land.