Labor Report

James John Davis, second Secretary of Labor since that Department was divorced from Commerce in 1913, celebrated his eighth year in office with a report touching all phases of the work in 1928. Some facts: The Federal employment service found jobs for 1,412,645 applicants. The Bureau of Conciliation intervened in 478 industrial disputes. It worked to tranquillize strikes and lockouts affecting 350,000 workers (but claimed no great success in the bitter, long-drawn coal strike of last winter, which it proved powerless to end). Immigration is in Labor's province and Secretary Davis dwelt at some length on how the restrictive immigration law of 1924 had worked. Two things worried him, or two phases of the same thing. Immigrants from most countries in the Western Hemisphere escape the quota law. The law specifies that natives of Canada, Mexico, Cuba, etc. etc. shall be nonquota immigrants, and recent court decisions have permitted aliens born in quota countries to commute into the U. S. to work, in border cities like Detroit and Buffalo. Secretary Davis viewed alien commuters with alarm and also the swarms of Mexicans, 80,000 or more per annum, who have been sifting into the U. S. and getting U. S. workmen's jobs because they will work for low pay.