Unemployment in the United States

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1828236179

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-226169

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Unemployment in the United States

Place of publication:: Washington

Publisher:: United States, Government Printing Office

Year of publication:: 1930

Scope:: II, 193 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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186 UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES see them directing men and women to well-rounded specialists in definite industries rather than referring them, as now, merely to jobs. Until, then, a community has one clearing house where all folks seeking work register their state and needs, any figures as to the number unemployed in that community at a given time will be the more or less inspired opinions of people willing to express themselves on a subject the layman knows as much about as the authorities. All the man in the street has to do in order to puncture their logistics is to inquire who counted the jobless, and how. But assuming, not for argument but for thought, that some day someone with a will and a wad reduces the x to a quantity known and indisputable. What then? How long would it be wise to use the figure thus gained as a pole star from which to make commercial reckonings? Not long, eertainly, in this day of news flashes and rapid transportation, for no industrial species moves faster than real job hunters in pursuit of real jobs. Early of an autumn morning a few years back I mailed from an anthracite center a registered, rush, special-delivery envelope to my superiors up the line. [t contained unemployment data—the views and forecasts of scores of coal-belt people I'd talked with regarding the more or less voluntary unemployment then existing there, and the number of miners idle, of mechanical and operating depart- ment employes temporarily furloughed by the railroads serving the region, and of platform crews laid off by the local traction company. Sources of authority had contributed the figures almost to a decimal point. SOME VERY NICE STATISTICS RUINED The envelope had hardly reached a mail sack before I was in the depot of the 2ity’s largest railroad en route to another community affected with the same scourge. For 10 minutes I stood in line at a ticket window as inside and out hundreds of men of Old World extraction milled their way through stacks of baggage. Three tickets windows were working to capacity at 6 o'clock in the morning. The vanguard of the unemployed I'd tabbed so religiously were leav- ing for greener fields, where jobs in orchards, on road and power-plant construc- tion, in the bituminous belt and steel mills beckoned them. ) How many? No one knew. “Thousands,” was the best the head ticket agent could vouchasafe when I passed his way a week later. “Thousands by rail and automobile every week.” And when I returned to my offices, a night's ride distant, associates told me of the hundreds of baggage-laden tourists who had stormed the office, for many of whom they'd found jobs. Not only, then, are figures on unemployment of fleeting value but a sponsor- ship of them by public officials or by groups imbued with the public interest may well spur others, equally public-spirited, to ask: ‘For what useful purpose?” “The American specific for unemployment is employment. Does it help the morale of a community, bolster the confidence and stimulate its manufacturers to recall old employes or to take on new ones to learn that exactly 11 per cent, we'll say, of the community's or of the nation’s workers are idle and therefore not potential buyers?” The queries are Mr. Walter J. Lloyd’s, director of the bureau of employment of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry at Harrisburg, and Federal director of the United States Employment Service for that Commonwealth. He went on to say: “It's a thing we should think about before we play publicly with figures. The individual, private or public, no matter how well-intentioned his purpose, who stresses unduly the extent of unemployment in a community, hacks at the very keystone of business and destroys the sole remedy for unemployment. And he serves ill those he most earnestly wishes to help, for a community whose leaders lose confidence stagnates until their confidence revives. “Many, I know, will disagree with me. I respect both their opinions and their lofty aims. But let them for a moment put themselves in the place of men who haven’t found the work they need. Will not the same figures that shatter the confidence of the manufacturer rob the jobless man of the quality he most needs—hope? Do not the jobless see and feel enough of unemployment without having the real or fancied fact that exactly so many others are in the same boat with them and their own prospects, therefore, made dimmer?” From a brief case he handed me a paper. ‘“Doesn’t that impress you as a nelpful bit of employment publicity. encouraging both to the worker and to the smployer?”’ I glanced at the paper. It contained a 200-word paragraph to the effect that employment within a certain distriet served bv his bureau was ranidiv mounting

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