The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man

by Nels Anderson

PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES

The state has been forced into the employment business because of the problems presented by private agencies. The public employment agency in Chicago has not displaced or even seriously affected the private employment agency. It is still only in the experimental stage, a laboratory in which the employment problem may be studied.

There are three public free employment offices in Chicago: one at 116 North Dearborn for skilled workers, one at 105 South Jefferson Street for unskilled workers, and one at 344 East Thirty-fifth Street, chiefly for Negro workers. The homeless man is chiefly interested in the Federal and State Labor Exchange located at 105 South Jefferson Street. However, the central office on Dearborn Street, which specializes in skilled and permanent employment, attracts two or three hundred homeless men a day, mainly from South State Street. This office is careful not to send out on jobs “dead line men.”

By “dead line men” are meant men who live on Madison west of Canal Street. Men “living” on Clark, State, and Dearborn streets are more reliable and stand a better chance than the “dead line men” to get jobs. The firms that place their demand for help with the Dearborn Street bureau generally want references, showing place of residence and name of former employer. Such firms will not consider a West Madison Street man. The clerks sometimes advise an applicant to change his address to that of some relative in case the applicant makes a favorable impression with the clerk. If a man looks and speaks intelligently but is too ragged and dirty to send out on a job, the suggestion is sometimes made to clean up and spruce up a bit. The transformation in some cases is astonishing.[36]

Probably four or five times as many men are placed by the private as by the public employment agencies. It seems paradoxical that the migratory worker should patronize the private labor agent whom he regards as an exploiter and a parasite rather than the free employment office, yet there are good reasons for his behavior.

In the first place, the office of the public agency, although little more than a block away, is not on the “main stem.” Strangers in the city find their way to the “slave market” without difficulty but may never become aware of the existence of the free employment office. A migratory worker likes to do a little “window shopping” before he takes a job. He likes to go along the streets reading the red or blue or yellow placards announcing jobs and shipments until he has made up his mind. The signs and scribbled windows of the private agency are maneuvers of salesmanship. The public agency has no such signs on the outside. The men must go inside to see the blackboard upon which the jobs are written.

Further, the public agency is in duty bound, as the private agency is not, to keep records and to get certain information from the workers who apply for jobs, and from the employers as well. The men who patronize these agencies dislike the “red tape” of the public agency; they are often unwilling to be catalogued and given a number, or go through the other formalities so necessary for efficiency. The decisive reason why the migratory worker patronizes the private agency is because it carries a better class of jobs. Jobs involving interstate shipments are usually given to the private agencies, partly because it is customary, and partly because they know how to solicit such contracts for labor. It is difficult for a man to get an out-of-state job in the public agency since it is more or less local in its jurisdiction. The private agencies attract the hobos also because they make no effort to see that he goes to work after he has been sent. Indeed, it is to their advantage if he does not go to work, for then they have the chance to send another man. The public agency makes an effort to “follow up” the applicants and to “keep tab” on them. The hobo worker shies from such solicitous treatment.

Mr. J. J. Kenna, chief inspector of private employment agencies, believes that the private agencies should be obliged to do likewise. He wrote in his report to the State Department of Labor in 1920:

Another question that might be given consideration is the subject of public information pertaining to the business of private employment agencies for the instruction of those interested in labor problems and legislation, namely:

A law compelling the agencies to furnish the State Department of Labor with a monthly report of the number of all applicants applying for positions, their ages, etc., and also the number of persons brought into the State and sent out of the State and to where sent, the kind of employment for which they were engaged, etc.[37]

Nothing would do more for efficiency in the employment office business than to compel the private agencies to keep as efficient records as the public bureau. The spirit of competition so prevalent in the private agencies is not present in the public labor bureau. The public agency stands complacently on the side, never entering the struggle to get jobs and men together. It is too much of an office and too little of an agency.

The public and private agencies operate upon diametrically opposing assumptions. The assumption of the public agency is that the man once placed will remain so long as the job lasts, and a large proportion of their jobs, especially in the Dearborn Street office, are for “long stake” men. A man’s record, his qualifications, are taken and he is sent out to the job with the notion that he will work steady. The private agencies, on the contrary, assume that few of these men will remain long on the job; that they may stay ten days or two weeks and seldom longer than three months. The public agency with an eye to permanency may be expected to move slowly in placing men on jobs, whereas the private agency will send anyone to any job that he says he can do and that he is willing to pay for.