Unemployment and Recovery

Report Outline
Continuance of Heavy Unemployment Relief Burden
Extent and Incidence of Unemployment, 1929–1936
Durable and Consumer Goods as Factors in Recovery
Labor-Saving Machinery and Future Employment
Special Focus

Continuance of Heavy Unemployment Relief Burden

President roosevelt reported in his relief message to Congress on March 18,936, that approximately 5,300,000 families and unattached persons were then receiving public assistance—3,800,000 on the federal works program and 1,500,000 unemployables on local and state relief rolls. Official estimates of the whole number of persons supported by the works program and by direct relief are not available, but it is indicated that the total is now in the neighborhood of 19,000,000 to 20,000,000 men, women, and children. That number approximates the corresponding total for May, 1935, and is larger than the estimates for the same month in 1933 and 1934. Federal, state, and local emergency relief expenditures increased from a combined total of $793,000,000 in 1933 to $1,477,000,000 in 1934, and $1,827,000,000 in 1935.

While the President estimates that at least 5,000,000 more persons were at work in December, 1935, than in March, 1933, approximately 15 per cent of the whole population is still dependent on some form of public assistance, and expenditures for that purpose have risen each year. Continuance of a heavy relief burden despite, evidences of substantial business improvement has caused growing concern. It has given rise to assertions that private industry has failed to do its part in absorbing the jobless, to contentions that technological advances have made inevitable the existence of a permanent army of unemployed, and to proposals for shortening the work-week and for restricting the employment of youths and of old persons.

Unemployment Data and Studies of Recovery Problem

There is an almost complete lack of official data regarding the extent and incidence of unemployment, and unofficial estimates vary widely. The only nation-wide enumeration of the unemployed was taken by the Bureau of the Census in April, 1930, more than six years ago. In June, 1934, the House passed a bill providing for a special unemployment census, but the measure was not acted upon by the Senate. The fact that the proposed census was to give jobs to over 100,000 persons just after the congressional elections led to Republican charges that the project was of political origin. It was reported on March 1, 1936, that the Business Advisory Council of the Department of Commerce had under consideration a plan for a census of the unemployed in 1937, long enough after the approaching elections to avoid accusations of patronage motives. Various government departments are cooperating meanwhile in a recently initiated W. P. A. investigation of technological unemployment.