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THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  UNEMPLOYED

purls  than  London  work  is  not  quite  so  irregular  and
the  permanent  surplus  of  “  dockers  ”  is  probably  much
less,  but  in  spite  of  all  efforts  to  organise  and  regulate
dock  employment,  the  total  “  waste  ”  of  labour  in  this
branch  of  transport  trade  must  be  very  large.
On  the  whole,  the  workers  engaged  in  “  the  conveyance
of  men,  goods,  and  messages  ”  would  yield  a  far  lower
rate  of  unemployment  than  the  manufactures.  We  must
next  add  in  the  rapidly  growing  department  of  public
services,  State,  county  and  municipal,  together  with  the
semi-public  services  of  gas,  water,  electricity,  etc.  These
routine  services  are  essentially  regular  and  would  yield
no  appreciable  quantity  of  “unemployment”  either  in
their  civil  or  military  departments,  unless  we  include
under  the  latter  the  lamentable  and  criminal  waste  of
“labour”  represented  by  the  constant  flow  of  soldiers
from  regular  military  service  into  the  Army  Reserve,
which  helps  to  swell  the  standing  host  of  untrained  and
low-skilled  labour.  One  other  large  class  of  wage-earners
requires  mention,  those  engaged  in  domestic  service.
The  conditions  of  this  work  impose  a  high  degree  of
regularity  in  employment,  and  though  the  multiplication  of
registry-offices  indicates  a  large  constant  flow  from  “place”
to  “place”,  which  doubtless  involves  a  certain  “leakage”
of  employment,  there  cannot,  if  we  take  the  country  as
a  whole,  be  a  large  percentage  of  “unemployment”  or
direct  “  waste  ”  in  domestic  service.  I  think  that  the
“unemployment”  of  servants  which  figures  considerably
in  the  accounts  of  Labour  Bureaux,  belongs  rather  to
the  large-town  problem  of  general  low-skilled  labour  than
to  the  specific  conditions  of  domestic  service.  Some  oversupply, ­
  however,  in  the  lower  grades,  must  be  admitted.