Operative unemployment, frequently described as irregular or intermittent, refers to that unemployment which results from the irregularities of the demand for labour in the ordinary processes of industry. In addition to the large fluctuations caused by sea sonal and cyclical fluctuations, there are fluctuations in employ ment attributable to the intermittent demands for labour and in termittent lay-offs which characterize industrial and commercial operations and occur for all the reasons that make industrial op eration irregular in volume from week to week or month to month—principally fluctuations in orders, sales, or raw material supplies, machinery difficulties, labour troubles, and the tendency of many companies to rush the work when they have orders and then lay off many of their employees instead of regularizing their operations as much as possible. Operative unemployment is a type particularly susceptible to reduction through efficient management.
Structural unemployment, which includes technological, results either from changes in the structure of the economic system of a country or in the structure of an industry through changes in its production and work processes. Structural unemployment is the by-product of industrial evolution. The unending stream of in ventions, not only of machinery but of buildings better planned for the uses to which they are put, better "lay-outs" of plants, new chemical and other processes, and similar improvements dis place labour, now here, now there, in every month of every year. The value of much manual skill is cancelled by them, even though in many instances they reduce costs and prices and eventually stimulate demand and increase total employment. Some of these improvements result in lower costs, larger sales, and a subsequent expansion of the demand for labour. Some displace particular kinds of labour but make places for different kinds. Many of these technological changes, however, displace workers from their for mer occupations without offering any new employment.
An important aspect of structural change is the shifting of in dustry from one locality to another, largely because new, modern ized plants are constructed in the new localities to get access to fresh supplies of raw materials, cheap labour, or other advantages. These new plants make it impossible for the old areas to hold their former volume of business. Unemployment results in the old areas while new employment opportunities are being created in the new areas of production. Sometimes expansion of plants in some of the old areas has the same effect upon others of the old areas. The phenomenon has been particularly noticeable in the United States where, for example, new shoe factories in Arkansas, Missouri, and other inland States have been making it difficult for the old New England shoe centres, while new paper mills and new cotton mills in the South are furnishing severe corn petition for the old mills in the North. Labour has been displaced
in the old centres and different workers, and often fewer, given work in the new ones.
Another structural change disturbing to employment has been the shifting of consumer demand. Product competition has been intensified by the unending appearance of new products, many of them produced on a large scale and marketed through the most modern types of advertising and sales campaigns. As a result, the competitors of products are no longer merely substitute products but include a wide range of commodities satisfying entirely differ ent desires of the consumers. Fruits are competing with auto mobile upholstery, garments with cosmetics, necessities with golf sticks. The sales uncertainties of all products are increased, and the employment of untold thousands of workers depends upon which way consumers' whims or their capitulation to sales efforts will cause their dollars to flow. Many entrepreneurs have reduced the effects of these uncertainties of the market by diversifying their lines of production to get a more dependable flow of con sumer demand.
Accidental unemployment resembles structural in its general effects. The term designates unemployment which results from such events as fires, floods, earthquakes, and droughts, which put individual gusiness units or areas completely or partially out of operation for a period and throw their employees into the labour market with, for many of them, no immediate probability of re employment. Seasonal and cyclical unemployment are both char acterized by wave-like movements, though the waves vary both in perpendicular and horizontal amplitude. They have a rhythm but not a uniform rhythm. The unpredictability of the amplitude and duration of their swing, and, in the case of cyclical fluctuation, of the time when a given up or down movement will occur, is one of the practical difficulties in working out policies for coping with them. Cyclical fluctuations naturally affect the seasonal. At times it is difficult to tell whether a current sharp swing of busi ness is caused by a particularly strong seasonal movement or cyclical forces, since whenever the seasonal and cyclical trends are in the same direction the one tends to reinforce the other, and whenever they are in opposite directions the one tends to suppress the other.