An examination of the work of that bureau shows that, in 1887, there were 816,470 persons engaged in wage earning in the State of Massachusetts. Of those, 241,589, or nearly 30 per cent., were idle during some part of the year—ranging from one to six or more months. The average of their unemployed time was about four months, or one-third of the year.
Now, 240,000 people idle for one-third of their whole time is equivalent, in money loss, to the total idleness of one-third of that number, or 80,000 people, for the entire year. The whole number of persons enrolled for labor in the State being 816,470, this is equivalent to the total idleness of one-tenth of the people engaged in all occupations.
If a number equivalent to one-tenth of the people in all occupations are idle twelve months in the year in a State like Massachusetts, where labor is better organized, better classified, and more efficiently ordered than elsewhere in this country, it can not be presumed that any other State of the Union will exhibit a smaller proportion of unemployed laborers.
The Census Report of 1880 states the number of persons employed in all occupations as 17,392,099, out of a population of 50,155,783, or a percentage of 34.68 of the entire population. Our present population being not less than 65,000,000, if we assume, as we are warranted in doing, that a like proportion of the population is engaged in occupations of all sorts, it is clear that we have to-day a working population of 22,254,000 persons.
Accepting as correct the careful deductions from the Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor that a number equivalent to ten per cent. of the people are always out of employment we find that at the present time there are 2,250,000 persons involuntarily idle in this country. How faintly does the term "the army of the unemployed" describe this vast number of eager and willing men seeking in vain the opportunity to earn a livelihood for themselves and families.
Were the business of the country in the active condition in which it could not avoid being if our money system were perfectly adjusted to industry, and if employers were competing for laborers with the same degree of eagerness that laborers are competing for employment, the average wage of a day for a working man would not be less than $2. This would make but the moderate sum of $50 a month for each workman, which, under the most thrifty system of household economy, can not be considered more than enough for the support of an American family.
THE WAGE LOSS FROM INVOLUNTARY IDLENESS.
By multiplying the number of persons thus shown to be idle, by this moderate average wage, we arrive at the amount of $4,500,000 as the daily sum which is lost to the wage earners of the United States by the non-employment of labor. This is a money loss of $27,000,000 a week, $117,000,000 a month, or the amazing sum of $1,404,000,000 a year. A saving of this sum for a year and three months would pay our entire national debt. This being the loss in a single year, we can imagine (making due allowance for difference in the numbers of the population) how stupendous has been the loss to the nation during the past seventeen years, a loss exceeding incomparably all other losses whatsoever.
If a crop of wheat be lost, it is appropriately noted as a public misfortune; if a city be burned down, or swept away by flood, it is properly regarded as a great national calamity, and the sympathies of all the people go out in unstinted measure to the sufferers. But here is a loss as real and as deplorable as any ever caused by flood or fire—a loss whose consequences, while not so apparent, are as destructive to national prosperity as the burning of ten cities, or the occurrence of one hundred and forty Johnstown disasters every year, and always to the people who can least afford it. Yet it passes almost wholly unheeded except by the sufferers.
A war that would take a million of men from industry and deprive the country of the production which would result from their labors, would be regarded as a calamity of unsurpassable magnitude, yet a shrinkage in the volume of money relatively to population withdraws much more than that number from productive pursuits, and without the salutary discipline and restraints of military life, subjects them to conditions of which the unavoidable results are poverty and crime.