192 UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES
. That is the very core of the whole proposition of moving labor through a
central clearing house. Labor is only as mobile as the money that moves it.
In this particular instance, Detroit employers did what employers so confronted
have to do. They themselves advanced the transportation.
The only other method that will accomplish a liaison in labor on a wholesale
basis is such as is practiced in Canada. Whether a similar arrangement can
or should be inaugurated here is a matter the American industrialist might
tonsider. The Dominion’s railways give workers rate reductions up to 30 per
cent, R. A. Rigg, director of Canada’s Employment Service at Ottawa, tells me.
The reduced fare is allowed only on the going trip and tickets sold only to per-
sons holding certificates which his department issues after establishing the
applicants’ capabilities and making sure that jobs will be theirs at destination.
In 1928 more than 43,000 artisans and unskilled workers took advantage of
this reduction. In addition to these, every year, 1929 excepted, the railways
on their own initiative effect a movement of more than 30,000 harvest workers
from the eastern to the prairie provinces.
HOW CAN WE MOVE LABOR?
Whether or not this method can readily be applied here is at least debatable.
So, too, may be the responsibility of passing the necessary regulation under our
interstate commerce act. Whatever one’s views on government subsidies, the
procedure seems refreshingly free of the taint of class legislation because em-
ployers as well as workers and the public in general would profit by it.
Until this problem of transportation cost is adequately plubmed, job brokers
will continue to be merely brokers. The greater the distance that separates
their principals the more tedious, costly and futile will be their efforts to bring
men and jobs together.
Assuming the transportation riddle solved, to what extent would one state
cooperate in transferring its workers to another? Only so far as its public offi-
cials felt they could cooperate and still hold the sanction of the community that
pays them. In fact, a number of States have laws restricting the recruiting of
labor by our-of-state interests. .
The only appreciable service that a national clearing house could render ab
present is to release accurate and timely information, not essentially about spe-
cific jobs, but rather about employment and industrial conditions—and to re-
lease it on the dot.
Each year brings me a striking example, a reliable and up-to-the-day series
of bulletins that in six months corrals 100,000 men from every state.
They come from the director of the farm labor division of the United States
Employment Service at Kansas City and tell when and where wheat cutting
starts, of its northward sweep as the season advances, of threshing, corn husking,
potato and apple picking; of the prevailing wages, living accommodations and
where and when men may apply. Public employment offices in Louisiana,
Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon,
and Colorado, working through the hub at Kansas City, direct to jobs thousands
who otherwise would go through endless wanderings.
A man eager for harvest work can walk into any public employment office or
any post office and see for himself in what zone his service will bé needed. But
it’s up to him to get there.
On a similar stage such offices can perform, and do, a similar service in bringing
about a contact between workers angling for a permanent niche and employers
who need them. A worker, for instance, in nearly any craft can enter a public
employment exchange in Pennsylvania, and if he wishes to follow his trade 11
any one of the commonwealth’s largest industrial communities, can gauge his
chances of getting what he wants where he wants it. At stated periods each of
the State's 14 district offices forwards to the capital at Harrisburg a summary of
the employment supply and demand in substantially all of the trades and voca”
tions pursued in its community. Fach report is then multigraphed and a com”
plete copy of all of them mailed to every office.
In a year’s time the aid rendered employers and workers through that medium
is considerable. An employer with jobs to fill and the ability to meet workers
face to face can ascertain his chances of finding in those districts the workers he
needs. He uses the information to a far greater degree than does the job seeker
Palpably a central clearing house that tries to do on a large scale what its
component units do with only moderate success is doomed to even less success
than its subsidiaries. A mail-order business in jobs shows results, but only 1P
