THE JOBLESS MAN AND THE MANLESS JOB
Black, John D.
The Jobless Man and the Manless Job What is Being Done to Bring Them Together? By JOHN D. BLACK "LABOR: The Milwaukee Labor Exchage reports increasing briskness in the labor market. Contractors...
...There are also jobs for men who do not care to work for more than a few days at a time...
...The lumber company's application for help came to the central office and was transmitted to Milwaukee...
...But the solitary brickmaker in Fostoria, Ohio, will never be able to finance an organization that will discover for him that brickmaking is flourishing and brickmakers are in great demand in Kokomo, Indiana...
...It lines up each morning at factory gates, or before newspaper offices fighting for the first chance at the "want ad" page...
...it implies a place where buyers and sellers of labor may meet to make their bargains...
...The Information about labor conditions and labor opportunities needs to be collected over as wide a field as possible and given the widest possible distribution...
...The state was then expending from $5,000 to $6,000 annually for its four offices and they were referring workers to from 15,000 to 20,000 positions...
...Only the larger cities will be able to maintain complete offices...
...The Wisconsin employment offices are therefore run as pure business enterprises...
...What is the United States doing with labor exchanges...
...These same interests have burdened the government with its weather reports, consular reports, geological survey reports and many others...
...Fifty statisticians collaborate these reports, work out averages and totals, and once a month send them broadcast by telegraph and telephone so that they take a part in the fixing of prices and directing the flow of produce all over the world...
...Positions in the employment offices in Wisconsin do not represent political affiliations...
...Contractors in Mac-ison and Racine are offering structural iron-workers 50 cents an hour...
...It must go after business and work up a following of customers like any retail business...
...Three shipments of 64 men were made to beet sugar growers In southern Wisconsin...
...Out of this combination of an efficient, well-manned state commission and a director in charge who knows labor conditons and knows the details and special difficulties of free employment agencies, has sprung the new life of the Wisconsin offices...
...To get such workers as these to new jobs with as little delay as possible is the business of public employment offices...
...Again, two banks in country districts have become branch agencies of the Milwaukee office and are procuring help for farmer customers...
...When these bulletins are issued daily and take their place on the market page of our newspapers along with the transactions of the stock market and the hog market, then will labor in one state in the Union have attained to a consideration a little more commensurate with its economic importance, and the laborer will seem to be of almost as much consequence to society as that which he produces...
...aid of what information the office can offer...
...An Office for Farmville THE data complied at each office from the applications for help and the applications for work in each industry furnish a rough chart of the labor requirements of the state...
...they have fallen far short of what was expected of them...
...Capital desires a large supply of labor...
...For the workers who are thrown put of work in the fall by the failing business of the farm implement factory, they can have ready and waiting new jobs in cutter and sleigh factories...
...To assist in this right placing of workmen, a record is kept of every applicant for work and every employer asking for help...
...The alert farmer goes to this page to find out what he ought to ask the buyer for his calves...
...Leiserson brought to focus on the free employment office problem and its relation to unemployment...
...It goes from door to door, on weary feet, often in despair and bitterness, humbly offering itself to perhaps already exasperated buyers...
...Their business on the one hand is to supply the employers who apply for help with workers exactly fit for the work to be done...
...The local superintendent has four clerks to assist him...
...On the worker's card is a record of all the jobs to which he has been referred, the jobs which he has secured, and those to which he has reported for work...
...It was the interests of property that thrust upon the federal government this business of reporting the crops...
...Each morning the daily papers publish the transactions of the stock exchange, the wheat-pits, the cattle markets and butter markets...
...Surely there is much more that can be done to draw the newcomer away from the Atlantic seaboard and to our farms...
...When the worker goes to an employer for a job he is given an introduction card, If he secures the job, this card is filled out and mailed to the office...
...But in the last adjustment a national labor exchange like that of Great Britain or like the Verband Deutcher Arbeitsnarhweise must be established...
...Every year since 1900 probably two million years of productive labor have been lost—enough to build seventy dreadnaughts, thirty to cruise along the Atlantic Coast, thirty for the Pacific Coast, and ten more to dog the entrances to the Great Canal...
...The onus of toil may come to rest a little more evenly upon the shoulders of our people...
...Here is a case in point...
...The German Way IN GERMANY this is accomplished through a complete system of municipal labor exchanges all banded together in the General Association of German Labor Exchanges...
...The application blanks filled out by both employers and workers require much information that is valuable in placing workers properly...
...In the course of this investigation, Dr...
...In Great Britain and Germany the labor exchanges have entered into cooperation with the school authorities and the parents, so that now no boy leaves school until a place has been found for him in some inudstry that has permanent need of him...
...There are, of course, jobs for workers who are no longer in their prime and strong, and the offices assist as many as possible to such positions...
...This is the extent of the public interest in the matter...
...And so labor peddles itself from factory gate to factory gate and sells itself for a dollar when it cannot get two, for the factory can do much better without one laborer than the laborer can do without the factory...
...With such information the offices can intelligently direct the movements of the forces of labor from place to place and from industry to industry...
...The British use the term "labor exchange" in place of "employment office...
...The new vocational education is turning out worklers who are able to turn a hand at more than one task—and are not all looking for white-collar jobs...
...Leiserson examined the work of all sorts of public, philanthropic and private employment offices, made a special study of the thoroughly well-organized and well-supported Boston office, went to Europe to study the German exchanges, and attended the International Congress on Unemployment in Paris in 1910, at which he read a paper on "The Struggle Against Unemployment in the United States...
...In these two fields the free employment service of Wisconsin and other states is bound to devolep...
...The Wisconsin employment offices are exchanges in this sense...
...The standing armies of industry may now and then hear a call to action...
...Two million years of productive labor, the equivalent of thirty thousand large trainloads of corn and wheat, let slip through our hands— and millions of our people in actual want and distress...
...A Wisconsin Expert on the Job THE first act of the Industrial Commission was to select as superintendent of the employment offices William M. Leiserson, the specialist in unemployment who made the study of labor conditions in New York for the New York State Commission on...
...It is of value to the producer and especially to the broker to know the wheat and cotton crop prospects for the year...
...The longer a man has to look for a job, and the more men he finds looking for the same job, the cheaper he will hire out...
...otherwise it wall fall into desuetude and be abolished by the state...
...they have not attained the success of the German labor exchanges...
...On the employer's card is a record of all the workers referred to him and those engaged...
...Already six cities have taken steps toward establishing such agencies...
...Chapter 462 of the enactments of the legislature of 1913 provides for the establishing of an employment bureau or agency in each city, village or community in the state...
...It is not jobs, but information about the labor supply and demand, that the offices distribute...
...The transformation of Wisconsin's free employment offices from a condition of weakness and ineptitude to offices which equal those in the German states was brought about within ten months from the time they were placed in charge of the Wisconsin Industrial Commission...
...The cost to the state and municipalities of the four offices for the year ending June 30 was $11,550, which is about 50 cents for each position reported filled...
...This bulletin reports by occupations and industries the supply of labor and the demands at all the offices during the month...
...The Milwaukee office is now centrally located, has separate departments for skilled and unskilled workmen and for women, and has installed a system of registration and record-keeping modelled after those of the best offices in this country and Europe...
...It must satisfy employers and workingmen alike of its service to them...
...In villages and smaller country communities, a public officer or merchant can act as agent, reporting any surplus or deficiency in the labor supply, and transmitting to the central office applications for help and for work...
...enough to bring the Atlantic Ocean to Chicago through a thirty-foot Lakes-to-the-Gulf deep waterway...
...No laborer is ever sent to a plant where a strike is on without being fully informed as to it, The employer may have union or non-union men according to his wish...
...At present only about two thousand agricultural laborers are being supplied to farmers each year...
...Many in the United States have had to fight for their existence before every legislature...
...the enlightened housewife what she ought to pay for potatoes...
...Three states have municipal free employment offices, six have state offices located in the capital cities, and,thirteen other states have altogether fifty-five offices operating in their largest cities...
...The first step in that investigation must be the mapping out of the industries of the state—the number of workers employed in each district in each industry, and the seasonal and other fluctuations in labor requirements in each district...
...If the men supplied do not prove satisfactory, the employers are likely not to come again, customers are lost...
...Capital and Labor LABOR exchanges in all countries have been handicapped by the suspicions of both the employers and the workingmen...
...But why shouldn't it have been...
...The National Labor Exchange again reports a congestion in the Pacific states, in Detroit and Buffalo, and a prevailing scarcity of laborers in the Middle West...
...It was this sort of thinking that Dr...
...This has been brought about, as in Germany, by giving to both interests equal representation on the managing committees...
...Under the old order of things in Wisconsin, the Milwaukee office was located in a dark room up a narrow stairway, and the superintendent did all of the business alone...
...The burden of unemployment is all upon the wage-earner...
...Nothing is half so potent in any campaign of constructive social reform as clear-cut thinking, the kind of thinking that brings order and definiteness out of a maze of principles and purposes...
...The Superior office has been receiving more orders for this kind of help than it can fill...
...they must stand at the entrance to the industrial world and point the way to occupations that assure a livelihood...
...The London offices found it necessary to sift out a hundred thousand disabled and vagrant from those who applied during the first year...
...Some of the exchanges are also banded together by states...
...The Public's Interest BUT the public also has an interest in the matter...
...In 1909 the German exchanges filled 1,500,000 places...
...Nearly six and a half million laborers looking for work, or loafing around waiting for work to begin, during one to twelve months of the year—and Congress and our state legislatures driven to restricting the hours of labor for women and preventing the working of children in factories and stores, employers even urging that our contract labor laws be repealed so that they can get all the help they need, mine operators clamoring for more men for their mines, millions of dollar's worth of grain going to waste because the farmers can not get help to harvest it...
...Peddling Labor LABOR, however, is still peddled about the streets...
...In Wisconsin, both employer's associations and labor unions have fostered the free employment offices...
...In this instance there occurred an actual readjustment as to place of the forces of labor...
...It is the better term...
...A clientele of both employers and workingmen is necessary for the success of the business...
...This is the tremendous maladjustment that is written in the books of the social reformers as the problem of unemployment...
...The employer, however, ought always to know when he is getting this kind of a worker...
...During the eight or ten years that public employment offices were maintained prior to September, 1911, the four offices (Milwaukee, Superior, Oshkosh, La Crosse) directed from 15,000 to 20,000 workers to jobs each year...
...Thus there has been developed a well-organized employment office civil service...
...Four out of ten wage-earners in New York in 1911 had to seek employment once or more during the year...
...In 1910, the last year for which complete reports are published, all the offices combined filled only 350,000 places, and 63 per cent, of these were filled In four states, Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington and Ohio...
...or enough to grow thirty thousand trainloads of wheat and corn each forty cars long...
...Neither will private employment offices, no matter how honestly conducted, and though they stand on every corner in our cities, effectually direct the flow of labor to the short-handed industries or to particular plants needing workers—because the information about work or the applications for a certain kind of help are • likely to be at one office while the particular workers wanted are at another...
...You can find on the market page the exchange price of any kind of produce from a pound of "prime live geese" feathers or a hamper of string beans to a barrel of flour...
...However, before this chart can be filled in with enough detail to make it valuable as a guide, a larger number of offices must be established...
...How large that interest is, let these figures from the Bureau of Labor's latest bulletin on unemployment testify...
...THIS REPORT was not clipped from the market page of a city newspaper...
...These committees decide all matters of policy, especially in times of industrial disputes...
...Sixty per cent, of the employers reporting to the New York Commission on Unemployment in 1911 stated that they could always get all the help they wanted from the people asking for jobs at their plants...
...There are almost a thousand private employment offices in New York City...
...These exchanges keep each other informed as to labor conditions and call upon each other for laborers to fill vacancies occurring in each other's territory...
...Except in two or three states, public employment offices must be declared to have failed in the United States...
...Both common and skilled workmen are in great demand in many small cities all over the state...
...Probably not more than half of these obtained employment...
...The employer comes to the office to select his workman, the workman to select his employer, each with the...
...The Bureau of Statistics of the United States Department of Agriculture maintains the most highly developed crop reporting organization in the world...
...Compare this primitive system for marketing labor with, for instance, the marketing of produce...
...the providing for these is a task for another agency than the free employment office...
...Of twenty-nine million wage-earners employed in 1900 nearly six and one-half million were idle an average of one-third of the year...
...Almost any large dealer in farm produce could afford to obtain for himself the information that he needs about crop prospects...
...Two of the state offices fill less than a hundred places a year, and several others only a few thousand each...
...The doctor specialists in unemployment must be allowed to go back to the sources of the disease...
...Leiserson frankly confesses that" it is the ambi-tlon of his offices to weed out the disabled and inefficient...
...If the applicants do not obtain job3 or if the jobs obtained are not suited to them, they will not be likely to appear at the office again...
...In the year ending June 30, 1913, the first year of the new order, these offices referred 42,608 workers to positions...
...Employer's Liability and Unemployment...
...Great Britain's National Labor Exchange with its central Board of Trade in London and four hundred branches In England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, in the year ending November 30, 1912, filled 700,000 places, although the first exchange was established only in February, 1910...
...The means and methods whereby this rejuvenation was wrought indicate very concretely what needs to be done with 'employment offices the country over...
...Fifteen or twenty traveling agents, a state agent in each state, three thousand county correspondents, and thirty thousand township and individual correspondents engage in reporting to the bureau at Washington the acreage and condition of the crops...
...The clerks obtain their appointment through civil service examinations, hold them as long as they tend to business, and are always in line for promotion and increase of salary...
...With the development of the country bank system and the community agencies, and the setting aside in each large office of a special clerk to look after farm laborers, the two thousand can be many times multiplied, the farmers relieved of much of their worry over hired help, and a larger part of the labor force directed into agricultural occupations...
...The interests of property, however, have had little to gain in the past from informing labor as to the condition and location of its market...
...The reserve forces of labor they can so muster that instead of fifty men sitting at every factory gate waiting for the busy season, this same fifty men will constitute the necessary reserve for three industries with different busy seasons...
...Another 30 per cent, selected all they needed from those responding to ads...
...What Wisconsin and Massachusetts are doing and hope to do, no state need hesitate to undertake...
...As for the immigrant labor problem, it is all our own...
...This is equivalent to more than two million men idle all of the year...
...Also they can aid and counsel each community in so developing its industries that they dovetail with each other and workers are never idle...
...Market Reports EACH month from the central office in Madison of the Wisconsin employment offices there goes out to the newspapers of the state a labor market bulletin compiled from the daily reports of the several offices...
...Leiserson described was that between a free employment office and a philanthropic enterprise, Though in its acts it may help un-fortunate individuals, yet to allow any trace of the taint of charity to be discernible in the operation of an office will defeat entirely its general purpose of serving society and the state...
...In Milwaukee IF, however, some day when you happen to be in Milwaukee between eight and ten o'clock in the morning, you will turn north from Grand avenue up to Fourth street to the free employment office there maintained, will look in at the men's waiting room and then at the women's waiting room, glance over the several hundred workers you find waiting there, listen to the bargaining going on between them and the employers who have come for help, note the tone of business and prosperity that prevails you will find a faith aroused in you that labor exchanges can be made to do a great service in the United States and relieve no inconsiderable portion of our unemployment...
...The public employment office is primarily for ablebodied men who are willing to work and are out of a job A large part of the work in any locality is casual or seasonal...
...Only the broken and outcast will make use of an employment office maintained for charity...
...The public interest dictates that labor shall find its best market and find it quick...
...These figures indicate that the labor exchange idea is vindicating itself In Europe...
...Four states have abandoned the work altogether...
...Altogether the office force can handle eighteen languages...
...Wisconsin seems to see before her in her free employment offices a means of relieving the greatest burden of her unemployment...
...In place of the hordes of laborers congesting on the Atlantic seaboard or scurrying across the continent in the wake of wild rumors of wonderful opportunities in Washington, we shall have a carefully measured flow of labor- into the expanding industries and rapidly growing districts...
...The Boston office, which alone compares with the Wisconsin offices in the thoroughness of the work, cost $1.02 a position in 1911...
...On the other hand, from the point of view of the workingmen, the business of the employment offices is to put all these who apply for work in touch with jobs...
...The RLumber Company, located away up in the pine country of northern Wisconsin, has been drawing upon the Superior office regularly for big blonde Norwegian lumbermen...
...but 85 per cent, of the employers never use them...
...Reducing the Standing Armies of Industry THE legislative act of 1911 placing the employment offices in the charge of the Industrial Commission also empowered that body to "investigate the extent and causes of unemployment in the state of Wisconsin and remedies therefor in this and other countries," and to "devise and adopt the most efficient means Within its power to prevent unemployment, to provide employment, and to prevent distress from involuntary idleness...
...First he limned out the idea that though a free employment office is a state institution, it has much more to do than to sit waiting to serve those who come its way...
...Other workers are replaced by machines, or lose their jobs through decline of business enterprises...
...An examination into the financial condition of the employment offices in the United States today would seem to indicate that most of them are starving to death...
...Preventive Treatment NO MATTER how indefatigably the public employment offices may labor at keeping the forces of labor employed, they will never see the end of their toil so long as the two steady streams of new unskilled labor, one the children from our schools, the other our foreign immigrants, keep rushing in upon them...
...Only the Massachusetts and Illinois offices seem to have had support...
...A "pilot" came down on the following Tuesday and took back to the woods with him thirty-six Austrians and Poles experienced in lumbering...
...Of course many of them do...
...Furthermore, this bringing together of labor and its market is by all of the tests of the political philosophers an out-and-out public enterprise, a governmental function...
...It is just as necessary to protect workers from dishonest and unreasonable employers as it is to save the employers from hiring inefficient workers...
...No Charity About It THE next important distinction that Dr...
Vol. 6 • June 1914 • No. 23
