within a couple of days, or within a couple of weeks, or a couple of months where they are prepared to wait, I think no matter what the figure of unemployment-whether 2,000,000 or 3,000,000 or 4,000,000-you will find there isn't terrific discontent with the economic situation. On the other hand, if you have people who are unable to find work for long periods of time no matter how hard they hunt, we will almost certainly get a large measure of discontent with the economic situation. Senator TAFT. What is the lowest we ever reached, in 1932, in unemployment, 5,000,000? Or 1937, say? Mr. HINRICHS. Until the outbreak of the war it would have been on the order of 5,000,000. Senator TAFT. Five million? Mr. HINRICHS. Yes. Senator HAWKES. May I ask you this question: As you see it, there is a vast difference between the man who is unemployed who has to get a job because he has to make a living, and the number of people who would like a job if they can get the kind of a job they want but who are not driven by necessity to take a job? All of this is more or less based on assumption but from my point of view there will be a number of millions more than that 3,000,000 you are talking about who don't have to take a job. Two or three members of a family might work according to whether it suits them to take a job. Mr. HINRICHS. I would say, in the first place, it unfortunately is a fact that for the majority of the people in the United States the thing we have liked to refer to as the American standard of living is only possible in situations where two people in the family are working that is, to get the kind of an income which will allow them to buy adequate food, reasonably decent clothing, and have just a little margin for expenditures which might be regarded as comforts or luxuries, depending upon how you classify them. In the second place, I think it is almost imperative that we look at jobs not only in terms of the economic need of the individual for employment but also upon the fact that individuals need jobs in order to maintain their self-respect and standing in the community. A job has more than one purpose in a community where it is assumed that people are working. We are no longer living in a South Sea Island economy where your ideal is to lie under a banyan tree. Actually what you find with reference to people in the labor market is this: Almost all males over 14 years of age are either in school or in the labor force. It is assumed that a man works, and he cannot maintain his self-respect if he isn't looking for work or unless he has a very good excuse not to work. If he is incapable of working he may develop a bad case of rheumatism as his excuse for not looking for a job. The variable factor in the labor force and in the social pressure to take jobs is found in the case of women. There has been a long-run trend in the United States and in all other countries for women living in urban communities to take jobs unless they have absolutely indispensable household duties as an alternative. The proportion of the urban women in the labor force from 20 to 24 years of age, single, is almost as high as the proportion for men of the same age. An unmarried girl finished with school gets a job. We still have a slightly larger fraction of girls than of men who just continue to live at home, or live in society, who don't take jobs. This fraction, however, is small. When a woman marries, she may or may not retire from the labor force. A little more than half of the girls who marry do withdraw from the labor force immediately or just before their marriage. The overwhelming bulk of married women withdraw from the labor force before the birth of their first child and remain out of the labor force from that time on. Senator TAFT. Out of the 59,000,000 that you talk of how many are women? Mr. HINRICHS. About 15,000,000 of that figure. Senator TAFT. Do you think you have allowed, as you go onundoubtedly we are pushing the educational age up and the old age pension retirement figure down. Do you think you have allowed sufficiently for that in estimating the labor force? Mr. HINRICHS. I think that we have. Senator TAFT. There is bound to be a development where people are going to retire at earlier and earlier ages, particularly if there isn't a demand for labor, and it seems to me that is going to be a progressive increase, and the best way to cut down a labor force if you can do the work without a maximum. Do you think you have allowed sufficiently for that group? Senator TAFT. Particularly with this stimulation to education we are giving in the G. I. bill, I think it is going for a while to stimulate further the college education group. Mr. HINRICHS. Certainly the two places at which to stimulate withdrawals from the labor force are at the young age by an educational program where you are building social capital for the future and where the individual is far more usefully employed than would be the case if someone of middle age was unemployed as an alternative; and, secondly at the upper ages by encouraging retirement. If in terms of your general social program there is ever going to be a liberalization of retirement provisions, the end of the war and the transitional period is the time in which to capitalize on the effect which that would have on withdrawals from the labor force. Senator TAFT. You are going to have very large savings in that group of people who will be able to retire earlier, from stimulating a lower age. Mr. HINRICHS. The figures we have would indicate that the excess in the higher age groups is not very great. It is somewhat in excess of half a million individuals. Senator TAFT. The excess, you mean war excess? Mr. HINRICHS. The wartime excess, yes. Senator TAFT. In addition to that I assumed that you took that into account, but I wondered if there wasn't perhaps a further decrease in retirement age which perhaps had been taken into account. Mr. HINRICHS. Its effect will be in terms of a few hundred thousand in any event but not in terms of millions. Altogether, about 2,500,000 people over 65 years of age are at work, but a very high proportion of those as a matter of fact are in agricultural employment where there is no definite age of retirement-you retire gradually, you continue working on the farm and there comes a point somewhere where you say you are no longer working on the farm at all. Senator HAWKES. How many jobs were there in 1932? Mr. HINRICHS. Let me guess a figure now of 33,000,000 to 35,000,000. I believe that will be close enough from the point of view of your question. (See table 1.) TABLE 1.-Estimates of total employment in the United States 1932, 1937, 1940 [Yearly averages in thousands] Senator HAWKES. Now, then, can you add to that how many jobs there were in 1937, which was a pretty good year? Em Mr. HINRICHS. Yes. In 1937 we were near to 45,000,000. ployment in 1937 and at the end of 1940 was just about the same. Senator HAWKES. I thought your maximum number of unemployment was 11,000,000. That is what I am carrying in my mind, that is what we all talk about. Now, if you employed all of them we would only bring it up above the 37 to 44. Mr. HINRICHS. Well, you have to remember that the United States is still growing in population. During the period from 1932 to 1937 or 1940 the increase was in the order of three-quarters of a million a year. By way of illustration, employment in 1940 and 1929 were almost at the same level. But there was no net increase in jobs over that period, and therefore unemployment in 1940 represented essentially the fact that the number of jobs had not grown as rapidly as working population in jobs over that period. Actually, I am sorry to say that there were no official figures of unemployment compiled in 1932. A number of estimates have been made which for that period range from a low figure of 11,000,000 up to a high figure in excess of 15,000,000. Again, I will insert the estimate which has been prepared by unofficial agencies for that 1932-33 period (see table 2). TABLE 2.-Estimates of unemployment in the United States, 1932 and 1933 [Yearly averages in thousands] 1 Mr. Nathan's estimates are published in Social Security Board's Social Security Bulletin, January 1940. Senator HAWKES. Of course, those figures will again be affected by the number of people who would take a job if they could get the kind of a job they wanted as against those who had to take a job because of the necessity of earning a living. There will always be a variable in' there of several million, in my opinion. Mr. HINRICHS. I don't know of any way in which that can be implemented in social policy. I recognize it as a social concept. But if you were trying to figure out whether this individual needed a job or didn't need a job or whether this broad class needed jobs or didn't need jobs, I don't know of any test of classification which could be built up that wouldn't do serious injustice to hundreds of thousands of people. Let me take an extreme case: A woman who didn't have a job before the war, doesn't have a job at the present moment, and who comes in to look for a job in the post-war period. There, you say, is a situation in which there is obviously no need for a job. Actually you have a phenomenon that goes back years in our history-the rise of a number of women in the labor force under all sorts of compulsion, as their children become grown, as their husbands become partially incapacitated and their earning capacity drops off, and so on. And to apply a concept of a needs test to the idea of whether there are enough jobs in the community or not, seems to me to be administratively and politically unworkable. I don't know of any tests that can be applied to the question of whether or not there are enough jobs other than the test that the individuals are actually seeking work, that the conditions we have laid down for employment are reasonable both from the point of view of the capacities that they have to offer, and from the point of view of the reasonable demands of the market Obviously, if everybody in the United States wanted to be a Senator and wouldn't work under any other conditions, there would not be a sufficient number of jobs of that sort to go around, and few possess the capacity. There must be an attitude of reasonableness on the part of the person looking for work before you can say this man is validly counted as entitled to something which is not available for him. But I think we must accept as a fact that the people will not be satisfied with the operations of our economy and social system unless people who are willing to actively seek work and are willing to take jobs within quite a wide range of occupations corresponding to their abilities, are able to find work; and secondly, that they are able to find work in a comparatively short period of time, if they are willing to move about and to accept some flexibility both as to the place in which they can be employed and the job in which they can be employed. You cannot possibly make it part of the dynamic economic system and guarantee that every man or woman may be employed in his specific occupation in his specific locality, world without end, inevitably. Technical change is going to mean changes in jobs and changes in places where jobs are available. Therefore, one of the tests of the validity of the man's claim to a job is his willingness in certain circumstances to move himself around and to go to considerable personal inconvenience to take a job and hold it. I think we must hold this idea of being able to find a job in a relatively short period of time in front of our eyes as our general objective. Senator AUSTIN. I want to ask a question, Senator. The CHAIRMAN. Yes, Senator Austin. Senator AUSTIN. Do you conceive it to be the duty of Congress to provide some central agency to assemble information and disseminate it, that is, the information of the opportunities, and the information of the pools of labor, coordinate that? Is that our job? To set up some agency to do this? Mr. HINRICHS. As to how the job is to be done, I think at the present time I would not be competent to speak. However, I would say that there are certain jobs which are obviously the job of Congress. The first job, I think, is actually one which goes beyond the job of Congress; I think it is the job of all of the people of the United States, of everything which is a political force, to make sure that our aim and intent to create adequate job opportunities is as nearly a controlling force as is, at the present time, the fact that we are engaged in a war and that we want all our efforts and energies mobilized to fight the war. If you granted the fact that the executive agencies do not always seem to pull in complete harness toward that end, granted the fact that here and there individuals in private life would seem to pull away in their immediate activities from the job of winning the war, nevertheless, the underlying fact is that Congress in all of its acts, the executive agencies, the community at large, have only a single purpose at the present time. That coordination, the basic and fundamental coordination, comes at the present time out of the concentration of our attention on this job of winning the war. In the post-war period and in the transition period we are going to need almost as concentrated a will as we have at the present time. In my opinion, that is far more important actually than an institutional coordinating agency. Without that will I don't think any coordinating agency can possibly do the job. There are too many things that have to be coordinated. It becomes much more difficult for that will to manifest itself for this peacetime job than it is for the wartime will to manifest itself. Among other things, you have powers during time of war which can be exercised if they must be, and I presume that nobody wants powers of that sort to be used in peacetime to compel adherence to this objective of producing jobs. In the second place, it would seem to me to be very clearly a function which only Congress can exercise to make sure that our public policies which do affect economic life directly or indirectly are developed in such a way as to stimulate employment rather than retard it. For example, very important questions will come up in the fiscal field, when it comes to a relaxation of taxes. There are important problems to be resolved with reference to the extent with which competitive forces are going to be stimulated as against forces that tend to restrain economic activity. Congress certainly has never to my knowledge set up any coordinating and overriding body other than itself and its own common purposes. Your legislation originates in a number of separate committees which will act together to the extent that they are motivated by common drive. Now, so far as basic information is concerned, our problem is not going to be one of the adequacy of the information that we have on employment or employment trends and the amount of unemployment. If there is anything to be gained by coordination there, it would be |