National Employment Bureau. There shall be a commissioner of employment who shall be the head of said bureau, to be appointed by the President, and who shall receive a salary of $5,000 per annum. There shall also be in the said bureau a chief clerk and such experts, special agents, clerks, and other employees as may be authorized from time to time by appropriation or other law: Provided, That no discrimination in employment or salary by reason of sex alone shall exist in connection with any officer or employee authorized by this act. It shall be the province and duty of such bureau, under the direction of the Secretary of Labor, subject to the restrictions of section 2 hereof, to provide facilities whereby employers may obtain the services of persons seeking employment and persons seeking employment may obtain such employment; to provide for giving publicity to applications and demands for employees and applications and demands for employment, and to procure and disseminate such information as may be pertinent to the purposes of this act: Provided further, That such applications and notices of demands for employees shall contain a declaration stating whether a strike or lockout is in progress or pending in the establishment wherein the work is to be done, which information shall be furnished to the applicant for employment. SEC. 2. That the bureau may only assist and cooperate with State labor exchanges where such exchanges are under State authority and comply with the rules and regulations prescribed by the bureau, and to this end the said bureau is authorized to contribute to the manitenance of said State exchange a sum not greater than the sum appropriated and spent by that State for such purpose: Provided, however, That nothing in this act shall be construed to prevent the bureau from sending representatives to States not having exchanges receiving Federal aid for the purpose of securing employees. SEC. 3. That the duties required by law to be performed by the Division of Information of the Bureau of Immigration, Department of Labor, authorized by section 40 of the act of February 20, 1907, entitled "An act to regulate the immigration of aliens into the United States," and all that pertains to the same, including all officers, clerks, and other employees occupying statutory positions in the said Division of Information, shall be transferred to and combined with the National Employment Bureau hereby created at such time and in such manner, arrangement, and organization as the Secretary of Labor may determine: Provided, That all appropriations and all allotments of appropriations heretofore and hereafter made for the Division of Information shall be and remain available for the said division until such time as the said Division of Information shall be transferred to the National Employment Bureau as herein provided. SEC. 4. That the Postmaster General is hereby authorized and directed to extend to the Secretary of Labor the use of the post offices and postal facitities, including postal employees wherever they can be used, and the Secretary of Labor is authorized and directed to use the post offices and postal facilities and such postal employees wherever practicable for carrying out the purposes of this act. SEC. 5. That the Secretary of Labor is hereby authorized to make all necessary rules and regulations for carrying out the purposes of this act. The feature that all these measures have in common is their recognition of the fact that the problem of employment, in time of peace as well as of war, is not a matter of local but of national concern, and of the further fact that it is not only a question of dealing with crises or emergencies of unemployment, but a practical device for so marshaling the labor power of the country as to insure the highest possible efficiency of the productive energies of the Nation. This requires that mobilization of the workers not by any species of compulsion but by the democratic method of the continuous collection and dissemination of information regarding the industrial conditions and the labor needs of every part of the country. This national aspect of the problem has been as widely recognized and so authoritatively set forth of late that it has become an accepted doctrine of political science. France, Belgium, Germany, and Russia have found themselves compelled to adopt it as a working principle in order to speed up the production which is necessary to restore their solvency and enable them to reconstruct their shattered industrial life, while Great Britain has for a dozen years maintained a national system of employment exchanges for the United Kingdom, and the Dominion of Canada has combined the employment activities of its several Provinces from Nova Scotia to British Columbia into a federal system, administered by a director of employment in Ottawa. The recent growth of the movement for the national directors of employment as well as its growing international importance are exemplified in the following extracts from the draft convention concerning unemployment unanimously adopted by the International Labor Conference of the League of Nations, held in Washington in November of last year: Article 11. Each member (State) which ratifies this convention shall establish a system of free public employment agencies under the control of a central authority. Where both public and private free employment agencies exist, steps shall be taken to coordinate the operations of such agencies on a national scale. The operation of the various national systems shall be coordinated by the International Labor Office in agreement with the countries concerned. In the report on unemployment prepared by the organizing committee for the International Labor Conference, comparative statistics are given showing the amount and fluctuations of employment in various countries in the years preceding the war. From these tables it appears that the mean percentage of unemployment in certain trades for the period 1904-1913 was 2.1 in Germany, 2.7 in Belgium, 4.7 in the United Kingdom, 7.8 in France and 15.2 in the State of New York. The report sums up the situation in this country as follows: The fluctuations of industry are more pronounced in the United States of America than in most other countries and, therefore, the variation in the percentage unemployed is greater. The prewar percentages of unemployment in the United States were normally about three times as great as those reported for England or Germany. The fluctuations likewise were more violent. The interpretation of these facts is not far to seek. In a relatively small, compact, and densely populated industrial community, like England or Belgium, or one as highly organized as was Germany before the war, the working population easily finds its level, and unemployment is comparatively slight; whereas in a country as vast as ours, with its great diversity of industries widely scattered over its area, the unemployed worker is too often stranded in the community in which he finds himself. The greater mobility sometimes attributed to the American worker is more than neutralized by the distance that separates him from his opportunity and by his ignorance of its existence or whereabouts. If, then, these European countries deem a unified employment service an essential feature of their industrial organization, how much more essential must it be under the most difficult and less stable conditions of industry which obtain in the United States. Fortunately our Federal system of Government lends itself easily to the institution and operation of a national employment service which is unified without being centralized and which by coordinating the independent activities of the several States combines them all into a national system free from the dangers of centralized authority and bureaucratic control. This is the system which has been embodied in the Kenyon-Nolan bill herein before referred to. The nature of the problem and its solution can not be put better than in the words of the President's Industrial Conference which was convened in Washington on December 1, 1919, and which, after an exhaustive consideration of the industrial situation in the United States, submitted its report under date of March 6, 1920. Under the title of "Public Employment Clearing House" the conference speaks as follows: The problem of unemployment is aggravated by the fact that at the present time there is no adequate method for mobilizing such a so-called labor reserve as, in spite of all efforts to reduce unemployment, may at any given time actually exist. At the present time there are many labor reserves, but no mobilized reserve. The creation of a Federal Reserve system in banking has mobilized and coordinated the nation's credit reserves. Under such a system the nation can transact a larger volume of business on a given capital and credit than would be attainable under a system of separate banks acting individually in their localities. Similarly the country's productive capacity can be increased by the creation of a unified system of labor exchanges, making what is in effect a single labor reserve that can be drawn on by industry in any part of the Nation. The conference recommends establishing a system of employment exchanges, municipal, State, and Federal, which shall in effect create a national employment service. The employment problem is in the first instance a local problem. The first objective must be the placement of local men in local establishments in order to keep as large a number of the employees as possible at home with their families. But no purely local approach to the problem is, or can be effective. Labor surplus and labor shortage exist side by side within the country at the same time, although not necessarily within the same State. Carpenters or machinists may be out of work in Chicago at the same time that there is a demand for such artisans in Pennsylvania. Perhaps more important is the constant problem of bringing labor from the towns and cities to the farms, both locally and-in times of great seasonal demand for farm operations when the need of the farmer requires the more extensive transfer of laborfrom both his own and neighboring States. Experience during the war has proved these general principles to be true in a period of high employment demand; they are even more generally applicable in normal times. Until a system shall exist for the gathering of information by the municipalities and States, and its exchange through a Federal agency, jobs will be seeking workers and workers seeking jobs at the same time but at different places, and a consequent national loss in production will result. The matter is not, and can not, be satisfactorily dealt with merely by private agencies, local and competitive in character, and operating at best within a narrow geographic field. The Nation has so vital and persisting an interest in maintaining the industrial product, and in reducing the hardships due to unemployment, that it must interest itself in the problem. At the present time 17 States maintain public employment offices. The work of these agencies was coordinated during the period of the war through the United States Employment Service-a Federal agency which furthermore opened offices in States having no State service, and thus established a system national in its scope. This system has virtually lapsed with the return of the country to a peace footing. To secure decentralized administration in the States, under the supervision of its citizens, to avoid the establishment of a Federal bureaucracy, to foster the development of such service throughout the Nation, the conference recommends the enactment of appropriate legislation by the Congress, making provision for an employment clearing house under Federal control, which shall allot to the several States that have established, or shall establish, State employment offices, their proportionate share of the Federal appropriation, but not exceeding to any State the amount that shall be appropriated from State funds for this purpose. This cooperative relation between Federal and State governments has been followed in other fields and may well be extended to the employment field. Such a service, if it is to succeed, must obviously have the full cooperation of employers and employees. The war emergency developed some weaknesses in administration, which in the opinion of the conference can wisely be corrected in the light of such experience. To justify the cooperation of both parties the needs of both must be served impartially. To insure such service, the conference recommends that committees equally representative of employers and employees be selected to advise and assist in administration. J. B. DENSMORE, Hon. W. B. WILSON, Secretary of Labor. |