CHAPTER VIII
WORK
The occupations that select out of the foot-loose males in our population the most restless types are:
1. Agriculture or crop moving.—When the crops are ready to be garnered labor must be imported at any cost. The leading crops in these seasonal demands are grain harvesting, corn shucking, fruit picking, potato digging, beet topping, cotton picking, hop picking, etc. If a man follows the wheat harvest, he may be occupied from the middle of June when the crop is ready in Oklahoma until November or December when the season ends with threshing in North Dakota and Canada. Workers who pick fruit may remain in one locality and have some kind of fruit always coming on.
2. Building and construction work.—Next to crop moving the building trades and construction jobs make the heaviest seasonal demands upon the labor market. Railroad construction, ditch digging, and similar occupations are generally discontinued during the winter. Carpentry, masonry, brick and concrete work are only carried on with reduced numbers of men through the cold months.
3. Fishing.—Salmon fishing on the Pacific Coast and oyster fishing on the Atlantic Coast are also seasonal industries. In the fishing industry, as in other seasonal occupations, there is a demand for experienced workers that cannot always be had when most needed.
4. Sheep shearing.—Sheep shearing is a skilled trade. Thousands of men are needed to harvest the wool crop each year and these men are forced to become migratory. The shearing season, like the harvest, moves from border to border during a period of three or four months. In the Southwest the sheep are sometimes clipped twice a year. The shearing jobs are usually short but lucrative.
5. Ice harvesting.—Formerly the ice harvest furnished employment to an army of men for two months or more during the winter. Ice-manufacturing plants have diminished the demand for natural ice, though ice cutting still furnishes winter jobs for many men.
6. Lumbering.—Working in the lumber woods and in the saw mills is not now so much of a seasonal job as it was when the industry centered around the Great Lakes. The industry has gone West or over the border into Canada, where, with the longer winter season and improved facilities, it operates almost all year. It is not necessary in Washington, Oregon, and California to wait for the snow to begin work in the woods as in Michigan and Wisconsin in the early days.
Certain occupations not essentially seasonal have a tendency to contribute to migrancy. In many metal mines a man’s health will not permit him to work long. He leaves and goes into some other mine in the same or a different district where the danger is not present. A miner tends to become a migrant for the sake of his health. There are other industries in which hazards exist that force workers to become transient.
The American hobo has been a great pioneer. New mining camps, oil booms, the building of a town in a few weeks, or any mushroom development utilizes a great many transient workers. After a flood, a fire, or an earthquake, there is a great demand for labor. The migratory worker is always ready to respond. It is his life, in which he finds variety and experience and, last but not least, something to talk about.
JOB HUNTING AMONG THE CASUAL WORKERS
In seasonal and casual work, as in all types of industry, a process of selection takes place. Great numbers of men are attracted into seasonal occupations because of the good wages offered. But only those remain who are content to migrate from one locality to another in response to the demands for labor. The average man soon realizes that in the course of a year seasonal work does not pay even if fabulous wages are received for short-lived jobs. The man who continues as a migratory worker is likely, therefore, to be a person who is either unable to find or unable to hold a permanent job. Some workers become restless after a few weeks or months in one place. Seasonal and casual work seems to have selected out these restless types and made hobos of them.
Migratory workers have a certain body of traditions: they know how to get work; what kind of work to look for; when to look for certain kinds of work, and where certain work may be found. They fall in with the seasonal migration of workers and drift into certain localities to do certain jobs; to the potato fields, the fruit picking, the wheat harvest.
The hobo worker finds his way to out-of-town jobs more often than to city work. Upon leaving an out-of-town job he is likely to return to the city in order to locate another job out of the city or even out of the state. This tendency of the foot-loose worker to drift into the city has turned the attention of the employer to the city whenever he needed help. Both the worker and the employer have been attracted to the city in an effort to solve their labor difficulties. Intermediate agencies spring up to bring together the jobless man and the man with jobs to offer. Employment agents, congregating in the Hobohemian sections of the city, convert those areas into labor markets.
Chicago is probably the greatest labor exchange for the migratory worker in the United States, if not in the world. Probably no other city furnishes more men for railroad work. In days past, when so many new railroads were being built, there were great demands for men in the West, and it was not uncommon to get a 1,000-mile shipment any time in the year. One is still able to secure free shipments of from 400 to 600 miles.
There are more than 200 private employment agencies in Chicago. There were, on August 14, 1922, 39 licensed private agencies of the type patronized by the homeless man. Eighteen of these were on Canal Street, thirteen were on West Madison Street, and the rest in close proximity to that area. In addition to these there are many agencies not operating on a commission basis which hire men for a private corporation and are maintained by that corporation. As such they are not licensed nor does the law affect them.
No figures are at hand to show how many men these private agencies place during the year. Their records are not merely inadequate; they are a joke. In fact, few of them keep records that list all applicants, all men placed, jobs registered, etc., though the state law definitely declares that this must be done.
The inclusion of the non-fee-collecting agencies will raise the number from 39 to over 50. If each agency sends out, at a low estimate, 10 men a day, and if each operates 300 days a year, a total of 150,000 men are placed in jobs annually. Over 57,000 men in 1921-22 were placed by the free employment agency. Many of these homeless men have access to other private agencies than those situated on the “stem,” and often they prefer to go to such agencies. If 100 of these agencies furnished jobs to 2 homeless men a day for 300 days a year, we would have an additional 60,000. About 250,000 homeless men pass through the Chicago employment agencies every year.
Employment agencies fall into two classes—the public, or those operated by the federal government, the state, or the municipality and those conducted under private management. The private agency is the pioneer. It was not only the outgrowth of a certain condition in the labor market but it was the reason for the creation of the public employment bureau.
PRIVATE EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES
The idea is becoming general that employment offices have a social responsibility. They have duties to the applicants, to the employers, and to the public that are more than economic; more than a business of selling jobs to jobless men. It is a responsibility that is not imposed upon the ordinary business man and that has no prominent place in the code of business ethics.
The private employment agencies that cater to the homeless men are chiefly located on the West Side. The 1919-20 Report of the Illinois Department of Labor[35] shows that during that period there were 295 licensed private employment agencies in Chicago. As we noted above, about fifty of these serve the homeless men. Most of these fifty agencies are located along Canal Street opposite the Union Depot, or along Madison Street between the Chicago River and Halsted Street. Some of these operate the year round, while others come and go with the seasons, opening up in prosperous times and going out of existence when the demand for labor falls.
A few of the private agencies are fairly well equipped; that is, they have desks, counters, telephone, chairs or benches, and a waiting-room which in cold weather is kept warm for the patrons. Others, the majority, have very little equipment, perhaps a chair and a table in a single, bare room. They keep no books other than what they carry in their pockets. For the average small labor agent an office is only used as a place to hang the license. He gets his patrons by standing on the street and soliciting. The other private agents are playing the rôle of man catcher, and he must do the same if he would succeed.
There are two types of private labor agencies—the commission agencies, and the boarding or commissary agencies. The commission agency is the pioneer job-selling institution which survives by charging a fee to the employer who seeks workers, or by charging a fee to the applicants, or by charging both. Usually they charge both the applicant and the employer, and formerly their prices were governed by the demand for jobs, on the one hand, and for workers, on the other. (If the competition is for workers they can raise the price charged the employer. If jobs are scarce they can raise the price charged the applicant.) The boarding and commissary agency charge no fee for the job. Their profit is made in keeping the boarding-house for the men they hire.
In the past it was proverbial that better shipments could be had from the private agencies in Chicago than from any other city. A few years ago the Chicago agencies were shipping men to all the big jobs within a radius of from 500 to 1,000 miles, and men would come to Chicago from 500 to 1,000 miles in one direction to be sent by the agencies to work on some job equally as far in another direction. These long-distance interstate shipments have been the chief factor in the prosperity of the private agencies. High prices were charged for the long shipments but the men were willing to pay them whether the job was good or not in order to secure free transportation west or south or east. The long shipments are not so numerous at present and the high fees are no longer permitted.
The charge sometimes made that the private agencies are gruff and discourteous would seem well founded if one failed to consider the behavior of homeless men on the street. These men would not pass the same judgment. They are used to speaking roughly to each other. They take and give hard blows in their dealings with the “labor shark.” Many men can get along much better with the blunt and unceremonious private agent than with the sleek, precise, courteous, and business-like officials in the public agencies. Their preference for the private agent is not for his gruffness or the ease with which they may approach him. It is mainly because he serves them better. They hate him for his fees but he gets the jobs they want.
The migratory worker resents the idea of being obliged to pay for the privilege of securing work. In every program that the hobo has advocated to change society he has made reference to the “labor shark.” The hobo worker is never disappointed to find that the job has been misrepresented by the agency. Nor is the agency surprised if the applicant does not go to work when he arrives on the job.
PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES
The state has been forced into the employment business because of the problems presented by private agencies. The public employment agency in Chicago has not displaced or even seriously affected the private employment agency. It is still only in the experimental stage, a laboratory in which the employment problem may be studied.
There are three public free employment offices in Chicago: one at 116 North Dearborn for skilled workers, one at 105 South Jefferson Street for unskilled workers, and one at 344 East Thirty-fifth Street, chiefly for Negro workers. The homeless man is chiefly interested in the Federal and State Labor Exchange located at 105 South Jefferson Street. However, the central office on Dearborn Street, which specializes in skilled and permanent employment, attracts two or three hundred homeless men a day, mainly from South State Street. This office is careful not to send out on jobs “dead line men.”
By “dead line men” are meant men who live on Madison west of Canal Street. Men “living” on Clark, State, and Dearborn streets are more reliable and stand a better chance than the “dead line men” to get jobs. The firms that place their demand for help with the Dearborn Street bureau generally want references, showing place of residence and name of former employer. Such firms will not consider a West Madison Street man. The clerks sometimes advise an applicant to change his address to that of some relative in case the applicant makes a favorable impression with the clerk. If a man looks and speaks intelligently but is too ragged and dirty to send out on a job, the suggestion is sometimes made to clean up and spruce up a bit. The transformation in some cases is astonishing.[36]
Probably four or five times as many men are placed by the private as by the public employment agencies. It seems paradoxical that the migratory worker should patronize the private labor agent whom he regards as an exploiter and a parasite rather than the free employment office, yet there are good reasons for his behavior.
In the first place, the office of the public agency, although little more than a block away, is not on the “main stem.” Strangers in the city find their way to the “slave market” without difficulty but may never become aware of the existence of the free employment office. A migratory worker likes to do a little “window shopping” before he takes a job. He likes to go along the streets reading the red or blue or yellow placards announcing jobs and shipments until he has made up his mind. The signs and scribbled windows of the private agency are maneuvers of salesmanship. The public agency has no such signs on the outside. The men must go inside to see the blackboard upon which the jobs are written.
Further, the public agency is in duty bound, as the private agency is not, to keep records and to get certain information from the workers who apply for jobs, and from the employers as well. The men who patronize these agencies dislike the “red tape” of the public agency; they are often unwilling to be catalogued and given a number, or go through the other formalities so necessary for efficiency. The decisive reason why the migratory worker patronizes the private agency is because it carries a better class of jobs. Jobs involving interstate shipments are usually given to the private agencies, partly because it is customary, and partly because they know how to solicit such contracts for labor. It is difficult for a man to get an out-of-state job in the public agency since it is more or less local in its jurisdiction. The private agencies attract the hobos also because they make no effort to see that he goes to work after he has been sent. Indeed, it is to their advantage if he does not go to work, for then they have the chance to send another man. The public agency makes an effort to “follow up” the applicants and to “keep tab” on them. The hobo worker shies from such solicitous treatment.
Mr. J. J. Kenna, chief inspector of private employment agencies, believes that the private agencies should be obliged to do likewise. He wrote in his report to the State Department of Labor in 1920:
Another question that might be given consideration is the subject of public information pertaining to the business of private employment agencies for the instruction of those interested in labor problems and legislation, namely:
A law compelling the agencies to furnish the State Department of Labor with a monthly report of the number of all applicants applying for positions, their ages, etc., and also the number of persons brought into the State and sent out of the State and to where sent, the kind of employment for which they were engaged, etc.[37]
Nothing would do more for efficiency in the employment office business than to compel the private agencies to keep as efficient records as the public bureau. The spirit of competition so prevalent in the private agencies is not present in the public labor bureau. The public agency stands complacently on the side, never entering the struggle to get jobs and men together. It is too much of an office and too little of an agency.
The public and private agencies operate upon diametrically opposing assumptions. The assumption of the public agency is that the man once placed will remain so long as the job lasts, and a large proportion of their jobs, especially in the Dearborn Street office, are for “long stake” men. A man’s record, his qualifications, are taken and he is sent out to the job with the notion that he will work steady. The private agencies, on the contrary, assume that few of these men will remain long on the job; that they may stay ten days or two weeks and seldom longer than three months. The public agency with an eye to permanency may be expected to move slowly in placing men on jobs, whereas the private agency will send anyone to any job that he says he can do and that he is willing to pay for.
THE CASUALIZATION OF LABOR
The casualization of labor, in spite of its concern to place men permanently, has a tendency to attract “home guards,” i.e., men who do not care to leave the city and yet do not want steady work. They may work from a day to a week, then they return for another job.
The following are a few of the names taken at random from a list of men who had been given ten or more jobs by the Federal and State Labor Exchange between March 1, 1922, and August 15, 1922 (five and one-half months):
| Number | Jobs | |
| Wm. Mitchell | 1,735 | 20 |
| Jas. Perry | 5,878 | 10 |
| Tony Felk | 1,195 | 10 |
| Jas. Griffin | 5,811 | 12 |
| F. Mullen | 5,069 | 21 |
| Ed. Moorhead | 635 | 20 |
| Fred Wagoner | 5,334 | 15 |
| Jas. Purl | 682 | 16 |
| F. A. Murlin | 5,390 | 13 |
| W. Galvin | 628 | 18 |
| A. Myers | 3,700 | 17 |
| W. Slavis | 2,202 | 19 |
| P. Myshowi | 2,408 | 15 |
| C. Carroll | 4,742 | 16 |
| Jas. Lewis | 3,872 | 16 |
The records show hundreds of similar instances. Some men have been sent to as many as forty or fifty jobs during a period of six months and few stayed with a job more than a month or two.
John M. secured 26 jobs from the Free Employment Bureau in less than three months between May 4 and July 26. The following is the list of employers with the dates of employment:[38]
John M. is a casual laborer. He is one of a type that works by the day, is paid by the day, and lives by the day. Don. D. Lescohier has described the characteristics of the casual workers:
A man becomes a casual when he acquires the casual state of mind. The extreme type of casual never seeks more than a day’s work. He lives strictly to the rule, one day at a time. If you ask him why he does not take a steady job, he will tell you that he would like to, but that he hasn’t money enough to enable him to live until pay-day, and no one will give him credit. If you offer to advance his board until pay-day, he will accept your offer and accept the job you offer him, but he will not show up on the job, or else will quit at the end of the first day. He has acquired a standard or scale of work and life that makes it almost impossible for him to restore himself to steady employment. He lacks the desire, the will-power, self-control, ambition, and habits of industry which are essential to it.[39]
The demoralizing effect of a period of unemployment upon the migratory and casual worker is indicated in an interview given to the investigator by Mr. Charles J. Boyd, general superintendent of the Illinois Free Employment Offices in Chicago.
Depending on one’s point of view, the homeless man, owing to the serious industrial depression during the winter of 1921-1922 had remarkable success in begging or panhandling. The spirit of the public during the depression was to help the unemployed man and advantage of this situation was not lost sight of by the hobo who worked on the sympathy of the public. With the approach of summer and improved industrial conditions, the hobo continued to make a living in other ways than by working for it. There seems to be an understanding among this class of men not to work for less than 50c an hour, and they are loath to accept steady employment at 35c to 37½c hour when they can do temporary work, and work at a different job every day, or any day one pleases, at 45c to 50c an hour. The hobo is reluctant to work in foundries or steel mills. He likes the open and when winter is past, the hobo, with few exceptions, refuses inside work.
The hobos of today are made up of young men, ranging in ages from 18 to 35 years. They form in groups of six or seven, camp in the “brush” and send a different one of their group out each day to panhandle in the town or village near which they may be camping. Then too, these men have very decided views on the Volstead law, before the enactment of which the hobo felt he had some inducement to work, for he liked his beer, if it was only 1½ per cent, and he did not know it. But since prohibition, his attitude seems to be “Why should I work any more than I really have to?” or in other words, more than to get enough for food and a place to sleep.[40]
The hobo is not unfamiliar with strike jobs. Corporations, when forced to the wall in a labor crisis, often come to the “stem” for their strike-breakers. By offering alluring wages and the assurance of security, they are able to attract from ranks of even the casual workers enough men to keep the plants running. Labor agencies of this kind are not popular on the “stem”; neither are the men who hire out as strike-breakers. But in spite of this stigma they survive as during the railroad strike in the summer of 1922. These railroad agencies crowded even to the heart of the Madison Street mart and eventually forced the private agencies to deal in strike jobs.
Strike-breakers or “scabs” are of four varieties: (1) men who are innocently attracted to the job (it is generally charged that this was the case in the Herrin affair); (2) men who are “too proud to beg and too honest to steal”; (3) men who have a grudge against some striking union, or against organized labor in general; and (4) men who hire out as bona fide workers but really “bore from within” and in the language of the radical “work sabotage.”
A NATIONAL PROBLEM
All the problems of the homeless man go back in one way or another to the conditions of his work. The irregularity of his employment is reflected in the irregularity of all phases of his existence. To deal with him even as an individual, society must deal also with the economic forces which have formed his behavior, with the seasonal and cyclical fluctuations in industry. This means that the problem of the homeless man is not local but national.
The establishment during the war of the United States Employment Service gave promise of an attempt to cope with the problem nationally. The curtailment of this service since 1919 through inadequate appropriations has prevented its functioning on a scale which the situation demands.
The emphasis upon the development of a national program means no lack of recognition of the service of local employment agencies. They are indispensable units in any effective plan of nation-wide organization. The bureaus and branches, in Chicago, of the Illinois Free Employment offices are now co-operating with the United States Employment Service.
A CLEARING HOUSE FOR HOMELESS MEN
The accumulated experience of the local employment agencies will be valuable not only in the future expansion of the national employment service, but in pointing the way to the next steps to be taken locally in dealing with the homeless man as a worker. The officials of these agencies have learned that the problem of adjusting the migratory casual worker in industry involves human nature as well as economics. A conviction is growing that in connection with, or in addition to, the public employment agency designed to bring together the man and the job, there is need of a clearing house which offers medical, psychological, and sociological diagnosis as a basis for vocational guidance, after-care service, and industrial rehabilitation.