IMMIGRANT WORKERS IN BRITAIN
If we go into a cafe in London we may well find a Negro sitting alone at a table there. The waiters will not, as in many cafes in America, refuse to serve him. He comes, perhaps, from East Africa or the West Indies. Let us call him Davy. If we start chatting with Davy he may tell us about himself, about his present situation and about his countrymen. He will tell us that there are about 10,000 coloured people in London, mostly seamen, students and unemployed. And they all can hardly make both ends meet. When they look for a job the Labour Exchanges* either refuse to recommend them or advise them to find jobs in another district. When he calls at a factory for a job he may be told "all our jobs are taken" — yet a "Hands Wanted" notice** hangs outside the office. There is no use starting an argument about it. Davy has found that only the lowest paid jobs and the heaviest kinds of work are open to him. He had quite a good education, but he had no chance of getting a job in England as a clerk, not even as a bus conductor. He had great difficulty in getting somewhere to live. He now lives in a room not fit to live in with ten other Negroes; each of them pays twice as much as a white family will pay for the whole room. Employers say that white workers are very particular who works beside them; landlords*** say that white workers don't like Negroes living in the same building. There is little truth in it. If we call on some Saturday night at a dance hall in the East End attended by young people, Negroes and white, we see that they meet in easy friendliness. They don't seem to mind chatting and dancing with each other at all. There have, it is true, been some British trade unions who were against the employment not only of coloured men but of German antifascists before and during the war, of Poles and Italians since the war. Not, though, because they were coloured or foreigners, but because employers gave the foreign workers lower wages and used it as an excuse to cut the British workers' wages or to get rid of the higher paid workers. (from "The British Scene" by George Bidwell) Ex. 49. Use the following words and phrases in situations.
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