Job Reserve

. . . How the hell can we work

When there's no work to do?

Hallelujah, I'm a bum.

Hallelujah, bum again.

Hallelujah, give us a handout.

Revive us again!--U. S. Workers' Song.

The Federal Reserve banking system stabilizes the U. S. money market. Might not some form of "reserve" be set up to stabilize the U. S. labor market--a national job reserve?

Dr. William Trufant Foster, Boston pedagog-economist, director of the Pollak Foundation for Economic Research, and Waddell Catchings, Manhattan manufacturer-financier (shoes, collars, cans, rubber, motors, fruit, cereals, dairy produce, drugs, magazines, cinema), collaborated lately on a book* in which they suggested that all U. S. markets would be steadied if the governmental agencies of the U. S.--federal, state, municipal--would map out and authorize large programs of public work which will be needed eventually though not immediately. Let these programs then be held in abeyance, said the collaborators, until such time as labor and fiscal indices show or predict a slump, local or national. Then let the contracts, hire the men, buy the materials, do the public work, convert the slump into a boom.

President-Elect Hoover knows all about Collaborators Foster & Catchings. They are the kind of citizens with whom he likes to think and work. Their "road to plenty" has much the same idealistic ring as his own "abolishing poverty." Their job reserve plan served as an exegesis of his own campaign promise of a large continuous public works program. So he authorized Governor Brewster of Maine to explain the job reserve at the Governor's conference in New Orleans last week (see col. 1) and to announce it as an outline of the Hoover plan for protecting Coolidge prosperity.

As outlined by Governor Brewster--with such joyous phrases as "in the twinkling of an eye" and "like the house that Jack built"--the job reserve is to consist of some three billion dollars worth of public construction projects on paper. Getting the projects off paper, translating them at judicious moments into sweat-producing, belly-filling, back-covering jobs for labor, and into cash-registering orders for business will depend upon the extent to which federal, state and municipal legislative bodies and officers can be persuaded and helped to "cooperate" (Hoover's favorite word). Also, patience and discretion will be required in large quantities to discriminate between public works needed now, public works needed tomorrow, and public works which will never be needed at all. The last category --joy of the pork barrel experts, sorrow of the tax-payer--is what will be watched out against by hard-headed businessmen who may suspect the job reserve idea of being "utopian."

* THE ROAD TO PLENTY -- Houghton, Mifflin ($2).