Sec. 19. #Remedies for seasonal fluctuations.# But of late there has been a growing hope that an answer may be found to this economic riddle of the Sphinx.  A number of different measures are being experimentally tested and applied.  Many years of effort will be required for the perfecting of these plans separately and collectively.  Some of these plans may be here indicated, however briefly.  To remedy seasonal fluctuations within the establishments output may be regularized by taking orders in advance; by producing various products successively in the same factory; by overcoming weather conditions as has been done successfully in brick and tile making, ditch digging, and building operations; by transferring workers from one department of an establishment to another; by improving the employment departments so as to build up a more stable force, thus reducing the great expense of “hiring and firing” and the loss through training “green hands”; by varying the length of the working day while keeping the same working force throughout the year; by cooeperating with other industries to build up a regular working force and transferring it from one establishment to another with seasonal changes.

Of great aid in a number of these measures is a broader industrial training for the workers, making them more able to change from one occupation to another.  For this purpose every period of unemployment and of temporary shortening of the working day ought to be used as a time for trade education, by the recently devised and successfully applied “short-unit courses for wage-earners."[13]

Sec. 20. #Reducing cyclical unemployment and its effects.# The maladjustments due to the movement of the business cycle are even more difficult to remedy completely, but are diminished by every measure that helps to reduce the great financial fluctuations.[14] Further, many communities have already begun to plan large public works more systematically so that they may be carried on mainly when private business is more slack.  A comparatively small amount of such work would serve as a gyroscope to preserve the balance of employment for a large part of the less skilled workers.  It has been estimated by Bowley, an English statistician, that in the United Kingdom, it would be necessary to set aside only 3 per cent of the annual expenditure for public works to be used additionally in years of industrial depression, in order to balance the wage loss at such times.  This is a well-nigh incredibly small proportion, hardly as great as that of the weight of the gyroscope compared with the car or ship to which it is applied.  It is hardly to be doubted that hitherto, in America, public undertakings have been executed much more largely in periods of business prosperity, and have been diminished during “hard times,” thus greatly accentuating the harmful swing of the labor-demand.  Finally, unemployment insurance, which has already been applied by parliamentary legislation in Great Britain to a group of nearly 3,000,000 wage-workers, is an indispensable and highly hopeful measure of relief.  The place of this in a general system of industrial insurance will be indicated in the next chapter.