4,000,000 Jobless?

Baltimore last week sent policemen to every family in the city to learn exactly how many wage earners, but not "tramps, beggars, gamblers, thieves," lacked employment. It is the first survey of its kind ever made by a U. S. municipality, according to Ethelbert Stewart, commissioner of labor statistics at Washington.

In New York State 20,000 people were laid off from work during January, said Commissioner James A. Hamilton of the state labor department. Unemployment was worse than at any time since the depression of 1921.

The Labor Bureau Inc., specialists in economic research for labor unions, last week estimated that throughout the U. S. 4,000,000 persons lacked work. One-third (250,000) of the soft coal miners of the country had no jobs. "General" Jacob Sechler Coxey, who in 1894 led Coxey's workless "Army of the Commonweal of Christ" afoot from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, last week at Manhattan said that on a tour from Boston to Minneapolis since last June he had found "25% of the factories idle in the territory covered." He is considered a reliable, although theatrical, observer.*

The Magazine of Business, careful, reliable, states in its February issue that for every hundred men who hunted jobs in 1921 (when in recent history the jobless were most numerous), 122 are now looking for work.

Great banks have been considering reducing wages. Suggesting in the current issue of the American Bankers Association Journal that banks cut interest rates on deposits, President Charles E. Mitchell of the National City Bank of New York (greatest bank in the U. S.; deposits: $1,275,041,000) writes: "While it is unpleasant to think of disturbing relations with depositors, it is even more so to think of reducing the pay of the bank staffs."/-

Last week the Riverside and Dan River Mills in Danville, Va., one of the largest textile mills in the renascent South (it employs 6,000 people), curtailed its working week from five to four days. The New England mills have been cutting operating costs by reducing wages (TIME, Feb. 13).

Federal Reserve Banks state in the February reports--Boston: "There was a further decline ... in the number of wage earners employed in identical manufacturing establishments in Massachusetts. The largest declines took place in the boot & shoe and the cotton goods industries, and were partly due to seasonal influences." Chicago: "Employment at industrial plants . . . showed an aggregate decline of 0.7%. . . . The comparatively small curtailment was the result of an upturn in the demand for iron & steel, which to a large extent counteracted the continued slowing-down in other industrial lines . . ."; San Francisco: In California, 781 firms employed 136,342 in December 1927; and 145,286 in December 1926; in Oregon, 166 firms employed 25,642 in December 1927 and 27,060 in December 1926. (This trend, from as far back as last November, has continued through the present in these Federal Reserve districts.)

Bright lights in the gloom were last week's reports that the Ford Motor Co. was employing 92,317 (the week before, 91,616) and that the Youngstown, Ohio, district would absorb surplus steel mill labor as soon as spring weather permitted construction operations.

*Now 74, stout and jovial, he operates the Coxey Silica Sand Co. at Massillon and is trying to finance development of oil properties in Oklahoma. In 1893 and 1804 U. S. business conditions were in panic; men lacked work. From Los Angeles one Frye, and from San Francisco one Kelly and from Massillon self-styled "General" Coxey led unemployed gangs of vagabonds, thieves and a few honest workers. They terrified the country through which they passed. Militia tried to suppress their depredations. Europe believed anarchy loose in the U. S. Soon the western hordes dispersed, and most of "Coxey's Army." Its remnants reached Washington 300 weak; were arrested, including "General" Coxey for walking on the Capitol grass.

/-Notoriously, banks pay low salaries, but augment them with large Christmastime bonuses.