Sec. 15. #Maladjustment of wages causing unemployment.# It seems highly probable that the artificial maintenance of a wage above the competitive, or value-equilibrium, rate of the individual, whether this be done by sympathy, by custom, or by the action of trade unions, must cause some maladjustment of workers in relation to available jobs and thus increase unemployment.  To doubt this is again to maintain the absolute inelasticity of the demand for labor with changes in its price.[10] If the true equilibrium wage in a certain industry were $3.00 a day, then a wage of $4.00 a day would attract to the trade more than enough workers to meet the demand for labor in normal periods (unless entry to the trade is controlled by monopoly power), and at length the losses from unemployment would balance the day-wages received in excess of the rate obtaining elsewhere for that quality of labor.  Any artificial obstacles to change of occupation or to concessions in the kind of work done and in the rate of wages must operate to increase the maladjustment.  So far as this maladjustment occurs, it may cause unemployment neutralizing the apparent gain of higher day-wages obtained by monopoly power.  The very inertia of wages, however, in new price situations[11] makes the wage-workers resist more vigorously such a policy of wage concessions.  Moreover, the difficulty here indicated is more particularly one occurring in static conditions and is to be distinguished from the dynamic maladjustments next to be considered.

Sec. 16. #Individual maladjustment in finding jobs.# Another kind of individual maladjustment is the failure of the jobless man to connect with the manless job.  A certain amount of this maladjustment must exist in the most stable industries and in the most settled industrial conditions.  Fluctuations occur in the market demand for the products of various establishments, requiring the taking on or laying off of some men.  Fluctuations occur in the plans both of employers and of wage-workers as a result of age, of removal, for reasons more or less non-economic, of desire to change occupations, of variations in health, and of countless other causes.  The needs of the employer for a worker, and of the worker for a job, are mutual.  To a large degree these various fluctuations are mutually compensatory, workers going and coming, orders increasing here and decreasing there.  Total jobs and total workers capable of filling the jobs, are at any moment in normal times equal quantities, if they can be brought together.  But almost everywhere is lacking a real labor-market.  The substitutes for it are largely ineffective:  trade-union action, employers’ associations, “want ads,” cards in shop windows, weary walks from door to door, lines of waiting men outside of factories, private employment agencies.  At their best the private employment agencies perform valuable services within limited fields, but they are uncoordinated, and utterly inadequate to meet the chief need, and at their worst they are the instruments of great abuses against the unemployed.