Unemployment Insurance in the United States

Report Outline
Development of Unemployment Insurance
Unemployment Relief in Great Britain
Unemployment Relief in Germany
American Unemployment Experiments

At the conclusion of the President's Conference on Unemployment, called to deal with the emergency situation which developed in the fall of 1921, a Committee on Business Cycles and Unemployment was appointed, with Owen D. Young as chairman, to make an exhaustive study of the whole problem of unemployment and to recommend permanent measures for mitigating the suffering and losses incident to periodic business depressions.

In its final report, submitted two years later, when business was again on the upswing, the Committee strongly emphasized the statement that effective preparation against depression can be made only in time of prosperity. The concluding paragraph of the report reiterated the Committee's conviction that

“unless business men, bankers, and others who are responsible for policies and practices in industry begin without delay to study and to act in order to meet the problems of unemployment and business cycles, solutions which may prove to be fundamentally unsound will be attempted without the benefit of practical experience. No problem before the business world today offers a more inspiring challenge to sound industrial leadership.”