The Labor Market and the Unemployed

Report Outline
Employement Problems in Recovery Period
Occupational Characteristics of Job-Seekers
Vocational Training and Apprenticeship
Hiring Age Limits and the Older Worker
Special Focus

Employement Problems in Recovery Period

Progress of the recovery movement is being accompanied on the one hand by recurrent allegations of labor shortages and, on the other hand, by complaints as to the difficulties experienced by older workers in obtaining re-employment. Increasing industrial activity is opening up jobs for many thousands formerly unemployed, but it is apparently persons in the younger age groups who stand the best chance of finding work. At the same time, the developing demand for labor is disclosing lack or impairment of requisite skills and is directing attention to the need of devoting greater consideration to the problem of providing adequate facilities for the training or retraining of workers, so that as jobs become available there will be individuals qualified to fill them.

It is becoming evident that failure to make such a qualitative adjustment of labor supply to labor demand may result, as recovery proceeds, in producing the anomaly of acute labor shortages in the midst of continuing unemployment of substantial proportions. Vocational training and retraining, and special consideration of the problem of the older worker, thus appear as essential aids to alleviation of the unemployment problem and to reduction of relief burdens. Technological advances may or may not threaten a permanent job deficiency, but it seems clear that action taken to fit job-seekers to such jobs as are or are likely to be available will help to reduce the extent and the burdens of any permanent unemployment, as well as to avert distortions in the labor market.

Results of Surveys of Reported Labor Shortages

For a number of months, there have been frequent reports of shortages of skilled workers in various trades in various places. Such reports in some cases have been accompanied by demands for discontinuance of W. P. A. or P. W. A. projects, it being contended that there not only was no longer any need for this form of relief, but that it was actually interfering with the supply of labor for private work. Complaints of this sort investigated by the W. P. A. have been found almost uniformly to lack justification. In some instances the complaints appear to have been inspired by political motives. In others the shortage has been not of qualified workers, but of workers who would take jobs at the unreasonably low wages offered. In still others the impression of shortage has been created by failure to utilize existing agencies for connecting the man and the job. In one Middle Western city, for example, an employers' association withdrew its complaint as to a shortage of electrical workers upon being informed that over 200 such workers were on the active file of registrants at the office of the United States Employment Service in the same city.