The Job Lady is often able to convince even the sitters that school is, after all, the best place for boys and girls under sixteen. She persuaded between twenty-five and thirty per cent. of the children that applied at the Bureau last year to return to school. Sometimes all she had to do was to give the child a plain statement of the facts in the case—of the poor work and poor pay and lack of opportunity in the industries open to the fourteen-year-old worker. Often she found it necessary only to explain what the school had to offer. One boy was sent to Miss Davis by a teacher who had advised him to go to work, although he had just completed the seventh grade, because he had "too much energy" for school! He was a bright boy—one capable of making something of himself, if the two important, formative years that must pass before he was sixteen were not wasted; so he was transferred from his school to one where vocational work was part of the curriculum—where he could find an outlet for his superfluous energy in working with his hands. Now he is doing high-school work creditably; and he has stopped talking about leaving school.
But it isn't always the whim of the child that prompts him to cut short his education. Sometimes he is driven into the industrial world by the ignorance or greed of his parents. Miss Davis tells of one little girl who was sacrificed to the great god Labor because the four dollars she brought home weekly helped to pay the instalments on a piano, and of a boy who was taken from eighth grade just before graduation because his father had bought some property and needed a little extra money. Frequently boys and girls are put to work because of the impression that schools have nothing of practical value to offer.
Still, even the most miserly and most stubborn and most ignorant of parents can sometimes be made to see the wisdom of keeping a child in school until he is sixteen. They are won to the Job Lady's point of view by a statement of the increased opportunity open to the child who is sixteen. Or they are brought to see that the schools are for all children, and that work, on the contrary, is very bad for some children.
But often all the Job Lady's efforts fail. The child is incurably sick of school, the parent remains obdurate. Or, perhaps, there is a very real need of what little the son or daughter can earn. Often some one can be found who will donate books, or a scholarship ranging from car-fare to a few dollars a week. Over four hundred dollars is being given out in scholarships each month, and every scholarship shows good returns. But often no scholarship is forthcoming; and there is nothing for the Job Lady to do but find a position for the small applicant.
Then begins the often difficult process of fitting the child to some available job. The process starts, really, with fitting the job to the child, and that is as it should be. The Job Lady always tries to place the boys and girls that come to her office where there will be some chance for them to learn something. But jobs with a "future" are few for the fourteen-year-old worker. The trades will not receive apprentices under the age of sixteen; business houses and the higher-grade factories won't bother with youngsters, because they are too unreliable; as one man put it, with unconscious irony, too "childish." So the Job Lady must be content to send the boys out as office and errand boys or to find employment for the girls in binderies and novelty shops. But she investigates every position before a child is sent to fill it; and if it is found to be not up to standard in wages or working conditions, it is crossed off the Bureau's list.
The Job Lady has established a minimum wage of four dollars a week. No children go out from the Bureau to work for less than that sum, excepting those who are placed in the part-time schools of some printing establishments, or in dressmaking shops, where they will be learning a useful trade. This informal minimum-wage law results in a raising of the standard of payment in a shop.
In such manner, the Bureau makes over many a job to fit the worker. But the fitting process works both ways. The Job Lady knows that it is discouraging, often demoralizing, for a child to be turned away, just because he is not the "right person" for a place. So she tries to make sure that he is the right person. That she succeeds very often, the employers who have learned to rely on the Bureau will testify.
"If you haven't a boy for me now," one man said to Miss Davis, "I'll wait until you get one. It will save time in the end, for you always send just the boy I want."
The secret of finding the right boy lies, first of all, in discovering what he wants to do; and, next, in judging whether or not he can do it. Very often, he has not the least idea of what he wants to do. He has learned many things in school, but little or nothing of the industrial world in which he must live. To many boys and girls, especially to those from the poorest families, an "office job" is the acme of desire. It means to them, pitifully enough, a respectability they have never been quite able to encompass. As a result, perhaps, of our slow-changing educational ideals, they scorn the trades.
Into the trades, however, Miss Davis finds it possible to steer many a boy who is obviously unfitted for the career of lawyer, bank clerk, or, vaguely, "business man." And she is able to place others in the coveted office jobs, with their time-honored requirement: "only the neat, honest, intelligent boy need apply."