working are fifteen or sixteen instead of the ten of other nights and
twice as many men are required. These Friday night men, many
hundreds in number, pick up odd jobs the rest of the week. At the
factory gates every night during the week, a number of men are
always hanging about ready to be taken on in an emergency, or to
fill the place of any man who, according to a very common custom,
has “ taken a night off.” In busy marketing neighbourhoods, a
whole class of butchers' assistants are engaged only for Fridays and
Saturdays. Analogous arrangements exist in many other trades.
Moreover, in every trade there are men whom the employer takes
on only when he has a sudden and temporary press of business.
They may be the “ glut men " of the customs department or the
Christmas hands of the post office. Every tramway undertaking,
municipal or commercial, has its reserve of extra drivers, conductors,
yard-men, washers, &c., who get a day's work now and then when
they are wanted. At Liverpool, and indeed in all large towns, there
is a whole class of casual carmen, who are taken on for the job as
required."
Then there are the accidental circumstances which incidentally produce unemployment, such as the displacement of labour by the progress of invention and improvement. The example of the distress brought upon the hand-loom weavers by the invention of the power-loom is only one of many, but the process is continually going on. The change, for example, from horse carriages to motor cars has brought much unemployment in its train. Then there is the unemployment due to decaying or declining trades, brought about through a persistent falling off of the demand, or through some change of process or of fashion; the removal of an industry from one place to another, the displacement of adult labour by that of women and boys, the continuous migration of unskilled labour from the country to the towns, and the depression in general trade caused by the occurrence of something unforeseen, as war. Then too, there are to be added the numberless frictions of industrial life, all contributing their quota to unemployment, such as the bankruptcy of an employer, changes in management, the arbitrariness of a foreman, &c. There are also what may be termed the political causes of unemployment, which depend on the commercial policy of the nation, in so far as it adopts Free Trade or Protection.
Recognizing the existence of the problem of unemployment,
and putting aside the possibility of knowing exactly its extent,
Remedies
for Unem-
ployment.we have to consider the remedies which have been
advanced for its solution. These may be classified
as temporary and permanent. Temporary expedients,
whether in the nature of voluntary relief by
individuals or organized societies, or on the larger scale of
municipal or state organized relief works, more properly fall
under the description of charity (see Charity and Charities).
Two particular methods of permanent remedy, however, are
especially favoured. The first of these is the establishment
of a system of labour exchanges, national in character if possible,
by which it is claimed that machinery would at once be
set in motion for assisting that mobility which is so effective
for the proper utilization of labour and which, even with the
modern facilities for travel, labour so lacks at the present
time. Labour exchanges would also, it is argued,
Labour
Exchanges.
facilitate the collection of data for the enumeration
and classification of the unemployed. Labour
exchanges have been long established in Germany. “ There
is a network of labour exchanges of various types. The
most important . . . are the public and municipal exchanges.
There are over 200 such, among the 700 odd exchanges, filling
now 150,000 places a month, which report regularly to the
imperial statistical officer. Practically there is a public
general exchange in every town of over 50,000 inhabitants, and
in a very large proportion of the smaller towns. Most of the
public labour exchanges date from 1894 to 1896 or received a
fresh impulse then ” (Report of Commission on Poor Laws,
1909). The causes of the success of the German system of
labour exchanges[1] are attributed by the Poor Law Commissioners
to (a) the high standing given to the movement by the
advocacy and practical assistance of all public authorities,
town councils, state governments, imperial government, &c.;
(b) the association through combined committees of employers
and employees in the management of the exchanges; (c) the
unequivocal character of the exchanges as industrial and not
relief institutions; (d) the excellent arrangements for the
use of telephonic, telegraphic and postal facilities by the exchanges,
and (e) the preferential railway fares for men sent
to a situation.
An attempt was made in England to start labour exchanges by the Labour Bureaux (London) Act 1902, which gave metropolitan boroughs power to establish and maintain bureaux, to be paid for out of the general rate. Before this act, however, certain municipalities here and there had made experiments in the way of exchanges, but they were never very successful, for they had no knowledge of what they intended to do; they were not properly staffed; they were hampered by bad rules; they were nearly all started in times of depression, exactly the wrong time to start a labour exchange, the time to start it being when trade is going up. The act of 1902 was a= failure because it merely permitted, and did not compel borough councils to establish bureaux, and consequently only a very small part of the metropolis was covered, and there was no interchange of ideas amongst those established. However, a fresh attempt was made to establish exchanges over a greater part of the United Kingdom by the Labour Exchanges Act 1909. The Labour Exchanges Act defines a labour exchange as any office or place used for the purpose of collecting and furnishing information, either by the keeping of registers or otherwise, respecting employers who desire to engage workpeople and workpeople who seek engagement or employment. The act gave the Board of Trade power to establish and maintain labour exchanges in such places as they might think fit, and to collect and furnish information to employers and workpeople. An important provision of the act was the authorization of advances by way of loan towards meeting the expenses of workpeople travelling to places where employment is found for them through a labour exchange. The regulations of the exchanges provide that no person shall suffer any disqualification or be otherwise prejudiced on account of refusing to accept employment found for him through a labour exchange where the grotuid of refusal is that a trade dispute which affects his trade exists, or that the wages offered are lower than those current in the trade in the district where the employment is found. The act also empowers the Board of Trade to establish advisory committees in connexion with the exchanges and imposes penalties for making false statements for the purpose of obtaining employment or procuring workpeople. For the carrying out of the act the whole of the United Kingdom was mapped out into divisions, with a divisional inspector at the head of each. In all the more important towns of each division exchanges were established, classified according to the population of the town. All the exchanges are in telephonic communication either with each other or with a divisional clearinghouse, the divisional clearing-house in turn being in communication with a central clearing-house in London. The advantage of the English system of labour exchanges will be found in the fact that it is a national system, with the support of the state behind it. Unless, as has been proposed, it is made compulsory in all large trades, much of its success will depend on the patronage extended to it by employers, which in its turn must be justified by the efficiency of the service rendered. Patronage by government and municipal authorities, while making an imposing addition to the returns of situations found, will not necessarily be an effective guarantee that the true objects of the exchanges are being fulfilled.
The German labour registries are of seven principal types: ther private registry office, maintained by ordinary agents for purposes of gain, and occupying itself chiefly with the placing of domestic servants; the travellers' homes and relief stations, which endeavour to find situations for their inmates-their success is not great, as the better elements of the labouring classes avoid them; trade union registries maintained by trade unions to assist their members in
- ↑ The German system of labour exchanges is exhaustively dealtwith in Report to the Board of Trade on Agencies and Methods for Dealing with the Unemployed in certain Foreign Countries, by D. F. Schloss (1904).
