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UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 185
WHEN ANY GUESS IS GOOD
These are questions I can but ask. I am passing sure, however, though our
main difficulty in ascertaining the number unemployed in a given area comes
from a failure wholly to define the meaning of the word. another hurdle more
formidable bars the way.
A last-winter’s mail brought me a task to perform. High public officials had
agreed that a deal of unemployment existed in the country at large. But how
much? That, they felt, must be determined. Specific instructions stated just
how the essential data could be reaped in my own community. And—quite
important—a fairly adequate definition of unemployment accompanied them.
That was that. How to corral the figures was the next problem. Fortunately
the letter of instruction told how. Six sources of information were to be visited
and the best possible independent estimate secured in each case. The informa-
tion gained from one source was not to be disclosed to another.
So to each said source the question was put: “How manv persons usually
employed are now out of work and looking for employment?”
No. 1, the local commander of a nation-wide organization devoted to salvaging
the down-and-out, smiled engagingly: “About 40,000, I should say, in the city
proper.
The secretary of the city’s charities organization, No. 2, shook his head: “I
haven’t the faintest idea. Have vou?”
“In the neighborhood of 60.000.” asserted an official of the city’s largest
employment group.
A private employment agency asked to be excused. “If we gave vou any
figures they’d merely be shots in the air,” they said.
Four that made. The fifth was a labor-union official.
“How many unemployed? 130,000 at the very least.” he said—and breathed
easier. *
The sixth and last was a high police official. The question seemed to tickle
him. “How many looking for jobs?” he said. “Too many. That's the best
T ean do for you.”
So much for the six most authoritative sources. A seventh estimate—my own
which was requested, was 35,000. Four estimates from seven sources; the highest
figure nearly four times the lowest. Whose was closest to the correct figure?
No one will ever know. All were shots in the air, because even with a cameo-
clear definition at hand, no agency existed then or now with sufficient funds,
time or staff to do the task in the one manner that sould possibly evolve the
riddle’s answer—hy a city-wide, simultaneous, house-to-house canvass; an enter-
prise as exacting and costly as the taking of the census. That it can be done or
some day will be is heside the question. It has not been done for the reason that
substantially no eity has a clearing house at which all its job seekers register.
New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, and cities a tenth their size have
their employment offices, private and public, but only in rare instances does more
than a very thin percentage of their jobless population patronize anv one agency
exclusively. }
And but a small minority of those who get jobs get them through either the
fee-charging of the public agencies. The, overwhelming majority land them
through the medium of help-wanted columns of the newspapers, corner-store
gossip, friends, and by approach to the employer or his personnel department.
The trend of the past ten years, nevertheless, is unmistakably toward a more
constant patronage of employment agencies of private and public sponsorship.
In the United States both are increasing in numbers; in Canada, where the private
agency’s growth is restricted, only the public offices are increasing. It is natural
that they should in an era like the present, when the supply of man power exceeds
the demand. For it is in such periods that the need for a specialized brokerage
service is most keenly felt. When jobs are scarce the jobless seek anv aid that
may unearth jobs.
And while employment agencies multiply, so, too, with a portent significant,
I believe, of a definite and come-to-stay policy, are increasing our commercial
and industrial trade associations; an arc of whose functions in many instances is
to recruit more substantial man power for their members. An official of such
an organization, if he’s fit, knows better than the broker what the plants back of
him nzed and how best to select the men and women to fill these needs.
Therefore, when the coming years crystallize this trend, the searcher for iitnem-
ployment as well as employment statistics will have a source more accessible,
accurate and authoritative than any now existing. The same gradual transition
will in all likelihood also bring emplovment agencies to broader nsefulness and
