Excerpt from Unemployment

The time is past when the problem of unemployment could be disposed of either by ignoring it, as was the practice until recent years in America, or by attributing it to mere laziness and inefficiency. We are beginning to recognize that unemployment is not so much due to individual causes and to the shiftlessness of won't-works, as social and inherent in our present method Of industrial organization.

During the winter of 1914-1915 the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, at the request of the committee on unem ployment appointed by the mayor of New York, estimated after a careful canvass of its industrial policy-holders that persons were unemployed in New York City. In the first two weeks of February a careful canvass was made by agents Of the federal Bureau Of Labor Statistics, on the basis of which it was estimated that were still unemployed at that time. The dis puted estimate of unemployed in that city alone, made during the previous winter by the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, seems, therefore, not to have been exaggerated. At the same time relief agencies in many other cities were swamped. Municipal lodging houses were turning away many genuine seekers after work - to sleep on bare boards at the docks, in warehouses, even in morgues.

The United States Census for 1900 showed that working people, or nearly 25 per cent of all engaged in gainful occupations, had been unemployed some time during the year. Of these lost from one to three months' work each; lost from: four to six months each; lost from seven to twelve months each.

Similar data were collected by the government in 1910, but they are still unpublished.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.