UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE; RELIEF.) Unemployment should be distinguished from idleness. An un employed person is idle, from the economic standpoint, but an idle person is not necessarily an unemployed person. The idle rich, vagrants, the unemployable, etc., are idle but not unemployed.
Not all contractions of employment by industries result in equivalent increases in unemployment. A part of the labour sup ply transfers from industries which are having their slack season to others which are having.their busy season. In such cases, the same people constitute parts of the labour supply of different in dustries and the shift of workers from one industry to the other lessens the amount of wasted time. It is easy, however, to over estimate the amount of such "dove-tailing of employment" which exists or which is attainable by "better organization of the la bour market." The majority of industries have their slack sea sons in the winter and the late summer, either or both. This con centration decreases the opportunities of the seasonally unem ployed to find alternative employment. During the slackest months, the number in need of work greatly exceeds the number of openings. The high degree of occupational specialization charac teristic of wage earners in the present day industrial system, geo graphic separation from alternative opportunities and unwilling ness to leave home, distaste for undertaking an entirely different type of work and union regulations present further obstacles to shifting into other occupations. In countries and areas where agriculture constitutes a considerable proportion of the economic system and where the distances between the urban unemployed and farm labour opportunities are not too great, agricultural work sensibly relieves urban unemployment during the harvest seasons. Lumbering and fishing have performed a similar function, to a limited degree, in some countries.
The term chronic unemployment refers to the unemployment which is suffered by marginal and nearly marginal workers much of the time. They are hired only when the market is pretty well
drained of better grades of workers or when the engagement will be so short that employers are not so particular about whom they hire. Some of these workers are along in years, others deficient in health, energy, size, skill, reliability, or other qualities demanded by employers. In the various local communities of all nations and among the migratory workers are many casual and semi casual workers who are employed less of each year, ordinarily, than they are unemployed. Some of them are capable of steadier employment if once their strength were built up by adequate food and medical care, and their efficiency by a period of steady work under proper supervision and with proper training. But a large proportion of this group are the siftings from the total labour supply, less fit and often with bad industrial and personal habits. They are in part products of irregular employment, in part of health and character defects, in part of the failure of their social environment to get them properly adjusted in early life to achieve that of which they were capable.
The concept "residual unemployment" was developed particu larly by Sir William Beveridge. He pointed out that there is "an irreducible minimum of unemployment" ( Unemployment, a Prob lem of Industry, Chap. V), which consists in part of the marginal workers just described, in part of seasonal and other workers idle between jobs, persons displaced by new technology, fires, and similar factors, in part of new workers who have come into the market. Many writers have suggested that modern industry has to have at all times some reserve of unemployed available for new or growing industries, seasonal and short-time increases in the la bour forces of particular concerns and for transfer to regions de ficient in labour supply. The "irreducible minimum," looked at from their point of view, is a labour reserve essential to the func tioning of a modern economic system. The reserve is fed con stantly by the persons laid off and depleted constantly by those being hired. The labour reserve, then, is a product of the fact that the processes by which workers are "alternately spewed out and sucked in" by industry do not work with sufficient precision and steadiness to affect the transfer of workers from one industry to another without an intervening period of unemployment.