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

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

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

Access restriction

Copyright

fullscreen: Unemployment in the United States

Monograph

Table of contents

Download

Monograph

This page

Image fragment

Citation links

Citation recommendation