Sec. 17. #Public employment offices.# Vigorous efforts to create local “free employment offices,” or “labor exchanges,” began in a number of countries about 1895.  The movement gained headway in the next ten years and has since steadily grown.  In Germany the chief exchanges have been founded and conducted by the municipalities (while others are controlled by the unions and by groups of employers) and have remained largely decentralized, tho cooeperating to some extent through voluntary state conferences of officials of the exchanges, and since 1915 required to report to the imperial statistical office.  The total number of exchanges in Germany (in 1915) was nearly 3000.  The general results have been remarkably good, altho not completely satisfactory.

Every industrial country of Europe has done something of this kind.  Great Britain, however, after some experiments with a similar local system, established in 1909 the first national system of “labor-exchanges.”  In America the movement is developing in three directions, through municipal, state, and federal offices.  These are united (since 1913) in an “American Association of Public Employment Offices.”  In 1915 there were known to be 99 state and city employment offices distributed through 30 states, besides federal offices operated in 18 cities in connection with the Bureau of Immigration.  The clearly recognized task is now to cooerdinate these various agencies into an efficient national system, eliminating partizan politics and elevating the management of all branches to the plane of professional service.  Through these agencies can be operated an industrial service, analogous in function to the weather bureau, and reporting from day to day the pressure of demand and the prospects for labor in the various parts of the country.  The economic results of a complete, exclusive, and efficient service of this kind would far exceed its legitimate cost to the community.

Sec. 18. #Fluctuations of industry causing unemployment.# Any one of the maladjustments in employment thus far considered may occur at a given moment, in static conditions of industry.  But there are also maladjustments resulting from more general industrial changes throughout a period of time.  The two main types of these are seasonal and cyclical changes, the one occurring within a year, and the other occurring within the longer period of the business cycle.  At the downward swing of these seasonal and cyclical changes the number of would-be workers exceeds the number of jobs [12] and the resulting unemployment is greatest when the minor and the major swings are both downward, about midwinter in a period of industrial depression.  Thus in 1893-94, and to a lessening degree in 1894-95, 1895-96; in 1907-08, and 1914-15.  Of course employment offices alone are no remedy for the exceptional difficulties of such times, and the individual, whether he be an unfortunate “out-of-work” or a more fortunate well-wisher, feels helpless in the face of the overwhelming burden of distress.  Such a situation is declared by the radical communists to spell the bankruptcy of the wage-system; while the most conservative students of the subject confess that this periodic chaos in the labor market is the strongest indictment of, and involves the gravest dangers to, the existing economic and social order.