UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 143 
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whatever standards of whatever nature he may desire. True, they 
must be with approval of the Secretary of Labor. 
As a representative of the employer and the employee, the fee- 
charging agency is naturally intrusted with matters of a confidential 
nature, privileged communications, I believe you gentlemen would 
term them. In fact, the private agency stands in the same relation 
to the employer and employee as the lawyer stands to his client. 
The group I represent is at all times willing and glad to cooperate 
and to lend its support to any constructive movement which would 
tend to stabilize employment and to minimize unemployment, but 
from long experience, knows that the elements of time and duplication 
30 enter into the matter of collecting, compiling and disseminating 
employment and unemployment statistics as not only to make their 
value practically nil, but because of their misleading character, 
dangerous. 
To ask or require fee-charging agencies to report to the State 
agency—I use the term ‘‘State agency’ as it is used in line 22 of the 
bill, on page 13—would aid Government competition with private 
enterprise and place the private agency under the prejudiced control 
of its Government competitor—a precedent inconsistent with Amer- 
ican principles. 
S. 3060 is, to say the least, subtle. I have met it before; I am 
thoroughly familiar with it, in its original state and the purpose back 
of the original draft. I venture to go further and state that it was 
the intention of the original drafters and of some, not all, of the pro- 
ponents, that this bill should arbitrarily regulate fee-charging agen- 
cies. I call to your attention Senator Johnson’s statement on page 
49 of the transcript of the hearings before the Senate committee over 
which the Senator presided. Just prior to the Senator's statement, 
Miss Perkins, Labor Commissioner for the State of New York and 
whom you heard yesterday, was discussing private employment 
agencies, when the chairman said, “Do you regulate their charges,” 
meaning does the State of New York regulate their charges, to which 
Miss Perkins replied: 
No; we have no supervision over them. 
The CratrmaN. That is what we are expecting to deal with in one of these bills. 
We know that the Congress of the United States can enact no 
legislation which will fix, determine, or regulate an employment 
agency’s fee. That was decided in May, 1928, by the Supreme 
Court of the United States. But if the Senator understands that 
the proponents are expecting to deal with the regulation of an 
employment agency’s fees, in one of the bills, certainly it is within 
the province of Congress, or the province of the administrators of 
the law, I should say, to deal with other regulations. Where in the 
bill, T ask you, gentlemen, does it give the labor commissioner, the 
director general, or the agency that is to be set up by the State, 
authority to fix, determine, or regulate employment agency’s fees? 
When this bill was before the Senate committee, Miss Perkins 
testified that the amount of business done by the New York State 
employment agencies was infinitesimal as compared with that done 
by private agencies in that State. If this is true (and I do not gques- 
tion it), the fee-charging agency has a very definite social and eco- 
nomic value and is doing a constructive piece of work. To choke 
11R808—30—sER 11———10