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 7 Great importance should not be attached to these figures for they con tain errors resulting from the inexact notions of inexperienced enumer ators as to what constitutes unemployment, and from the inclusion of all persons gainfully employed, whether self-employed or in professional, salaried, or wage-earning positions.
anxiety, demoralizing and unfitting for return to work. Ir regular work is generally recognized to be a greater cause of poverty and of actual pauperism than is a low wage regularly received.
It is impossible for the industrially more fortunate per sons and classes of the nation (excepting the few who have learned by personal adventures or by sympathetic study of the problem) to comprehend how inevitably unemployment and the fear of it shape the social theories as well as the industrial character of the propertyless workers. The edu cated and the prosperous denounce with contempt mingled with inquietude the vagaries of the Industrial Workers of the World and the destructive doctrines of Utopian com munists. Such ideas are attributed to ignorance, to natural perversity, or, still more often, to the influence of ignorant and dangerous leaders. But, as an employer who lived for months as a manual laborer, has said: "To the worker the job is the axle of his entire world." It is "impossible to overstate the way in which the having of the job affects the whole circle of a man's life; all his thinkings, all his feelings. all his believings, all his attitudes and concepts and beliefs." "When we see men thinking 'queerly' or feeling 'queerly' and embracing strange philosophies, . . . we ought to put our first question mark against the circumstances of their § 13. Individual maladjustments causing unemployment. The cause or causes of the evil must be ascertained before a remedy can be intelligently applied. At the outset the problem of unemployment must be clearly distinguished from that of over-population and low wages. It is essentially a problem of maladjustment of the labor supply. That is,
there is, under static conditions, work for all to do at various rates of wages that would bring about a value equilib 9 Mr. Whiting Williams, formerly vice-president of the Hydraulic Pressed Steel Company, in an address, "The Job and Utopia." Bul letin of the American Association for Labor Legislation, March, 1921.
rium of services." ' The maladjustments are either of an individual or of a general character affecting numerous in dividuals.
Individual maladjustment may be due to a mistake in choosing an occupation (e.g., through the vain tanbition of one unfitted to be an artist, actor, lawyer, or teacher) ; or to failure to acquire by adequate training the necessary skill; or to loss of capacity by accident, old age, or failure of mental or moral powers; in all of which cases the problem verges upon or be comes that of the unemployable. The "can't-works" and the "wont-works" must be divided from the "want-works." If there is any remedy in such cases, it must be through reedu cation, personal reform, or change of occupation.
Many persons look upon this type of cases as almost wholly accounting for the problem of the unemployed. They are confirmed in this opinion by the fact that the out-of-work group in any trade at any time is, on the average, the least efficient group of workers in the trade. This results from selection by the employers. This selection is due to the rela tive, not to the absolute, efficiency or inefficiency of workers, and must result whenever there are any discoverable economic differences in the workers (all things considered) that are employed at the same wage. This would continue even though the poorest workers were to raise their efficiency above that of the best men now retained. "Personal inefficiency" may ex plain a chronic low wage or absolute unemployability in a par ticular case, but it does not explain intermittent lack of work for those willing and able to work. Unemployment is a social problem and not merely an individual problem.