In every country and at all times where the wage system prevails, some wage-workers, now more and now less, are “out of work” and unable to get it.  The proportion that they constitute of all workers cannot, with the aid of any existing statistics, be exactly told, nor can exact comparisons be made between different countries.  Of the magnitude, importance, and difficulty of this “problem of the unemployed” there is, however, no question.  It is greatest, speaking generally, in manufacturing industries, tho, among the various kinds, great differences in this respect appear.  In 1900 the United States census reported that of all persons in gainful occupations 2.5 per cent had been unemployed more than half the year, 8.8 per cent from three to six months, and 11 per cent one to three months, a total of 22.3 per cent more than one month.[7] In 1911 in a large group (nearly all) of the manufacturing industries, the minimum number of wage-earners employed (in January) was 13 per cent below the maximum (in November).  In some the difference was much greater (e.g., 24 per cent in the iron industry, 63 per cent in the brick and tile industry).  Statistics of unemployment among trade-unions in New York and Massachusetts indicate that the annual average of unemployment is between 12 and 15 per cent.  In some years upwards of 10 per cent of all the working time of the wage-earning population is lost by unemployment.

Sec. 12. #Evils of unemployment.# A considerable part of the total in an ordinary year may be set aside as “normal” in the sense that it is allowed for in the wage-workers’ plans;[8] and a part of it may even be desirable.  Yet there remains an inconceivable sum of suffering in the lives of the workers, and an enormous economic waste of productive energy not only for them but for the whole community.  The irregularity, and occasionally the excessive duration, of these periods of unemployment too often makes unemployment not a beneficent vacation (comparable to shorter hours), but a period of tragic anxiety, demoralizing and unfitting for return to work.  Irregular work is generally recognized to be a greater cause of poverty and of actual pauperism than is a low wage regularly received.

Sec. 13. #Definition of unemployment.# Unemployment is the state of a wage-worker for the time out of a job.  But this definition needs to be further explained and limited if it is to be useful in the discussion of unemployment as an evil calling for social remedy.  There must be set aside the cases where the lack of a job is due to one rest day in seven and to legal holidays, a total of nearly 65 days in most American states; to the worker’s being on strike; to temporary sickness; finally, and more difficult to distinguish, that due to continued disability, physical, mental, or moral, to do the work up to an acceptable standard and to retain a job in the occupation chosen by the applicant.  The first cannot be called a problem, and the others constitute the problems of strikes, of industrial sickness, and of the unemployables, respectively.