The unemployment figure for Dundee was reduced by one last Tuesday when John McKaig, skilled engineer, was given a job as a coalman. He says he was lucky.
It took as long to train Mr McKaig as it takes to train a doctor. At his last job in his own trade his wages were £9 8s a week plus overtime plus an output bonus. He expects his wages this week to be £8 plus nothing; and that is a good deal better than the dole at £5 a week for a man with a wife and two children.
At the Ministry of Labour’s last count Dundee’s unemployment rate was 5.2 per cent of the insured population, better than many another in Scotland today. But it would be a good deal higher if men like Mr McKaig had not despaired of finding a job where someone needs their skill, for engineering has been taking a beating in Dundee.
Mr McKaig’s firm, the Logan Mining Machinery Company, was a sub-contractor to another firm which was building locomotives for the Coal Board. The sub-contract ended abruptly in the middle of a shift. “They just came and told us to stop what we were doing,” said Mr McKaig. “We had been working seven days a week and up to nine at night, and the night shift working fantastic hours, and there was overtime at week-ends.”
At twenty-six Mr McKaig is young enough to start again. Others are not so lucky. On Thursday the venerable Dundee firm of Urquhart Lindsay and Robertson Orchar gave a belated parting present to an old employee, Mr George S Wann, thirty years with the company, most of them as a skilled machinist. It was Mr Wann’s first windfall in the four months since the company closed its Blackness foundry. (He got 6s 8d for each year’s service.)
Extract from the article by Mark Arnold-Foster
