Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
The first and most obvious thing to do is to ascertain whether there is
any demand in the regular market for the labour which is thus thrown
upon our hands. In order to ascertain this I have already established a
Labour Bureau, the operations of which I shall at once largely extend,
at which employers can register their needs, and workmen can register
their names and the kind of work they can do.
At present there is no labour exchange in existence in this country.
The columns of the daily newspaper are the only substitute for this
much needed register. It is one of the many painful consequences
arising from the overgrowth of cities. In a village where everybody
knows everybody else this necessity does not exist. If a farmer wants
a couple of extra men for mowing or some more women for binding at
harvest time, he runs over in his mind the names of every available
person in the parish. Even in a small town there is little difficulty
in knowing who wants employment. But in the cities this knowledge is
not available; hence we constantly hear of persons who would be very
glad to employ labour for odd jobs in an occasional stress of work
while at the same time hundreds of persons are starving for want of
work at another end of the town. To meet this evil the laws of Supply
and Demand have created the Sweating Middlemen, who farm out the
unfortunates and charge so heavy a commission for their share that the
poor wretches who do the work receive hardly enough to keep body and
soul together. I propose to change all this by establishing Registers
which will enable us to lay our hands at a moment's notice upon all the
unemployed men in a district in any particular trade. In this way we
should become the universal intermediary between those who have no
employment and those who want workmen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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