|
|
BRUERE on JAMESTOWN, N.Y. The problem of getting people back to work in Jamestown is not primarily a problem of relief. The emergency there is not one which will be cured by a general revival of business throughout the country, not even if there comes a boom Their problem is to find a new basis of livelihood for over 7000 people formerly employed in establishments which have either moved away, gone into bankruptcy, or been torn down. It is a problem of reconstruction. The Chairman of the emergency Relief Bureau, is wrestling with the hopeless sort of a problem which there is no present way to solve, the Field Agent in charge, is cooperating with him effectively, and they have organized their staff as though it were a business office which they were running. Technically it clicks as it should, and the spirit inside it is good. The E. R. B. is however hampered by two things. The first the active opposition of the City Welfare Department, which is apparently furiously jealous that any organization should take precedence of them, and distrustful of modern social relief procedure as against the older "Lady Bountiful" idea. The second is the opposition of that group of taxpayers who having been hard hit by the depression, feel that "relief n should be kept on the plane with "charity; who resent most of the work relief projects as both unnecessary and extravagant; and who refer to the E. R. B. as the "Untouchables", an epithet under which the chairman winces visibly. In the face of these difficulties the E. R. B. has put through a remarkably successful program. Their relief work projects include a new sewer, the extension of an important water main, the creation of one park and the rehabilitation of another, a wood cutting enterprise to furnish firewood to families on relief, and the laying out of a large athletic field. There have also been various repair jobs on public buildings and some road work, and the establishment of 500 subsistence gardens which last year grew $11,000.00 worth of food. The E. R. B. were unable to give the exact case load because all relief cases were investigated first by the Welfare Department and they did not keep their records up to date nor make them available for the E. R. B. except on compulsion. The Welfare Commissioner is Swedish as are most of the citizens of Jamestown. He was formerly an employee of the Art Metal Company, and a member of the union affiliated with the A. F. of L. He is stocky and square, somewhere over forty, extremely pleasant and gentle. He has apparently no idea of organizing or routing work. The whole office ;vas in confusion. People came and went without knocking on all sorts of errands. It was clear why the business-like office of the E. R. B. did not get records of relief work on time--or ever. The Commissioner assured me that they usually had somewhere between 1600 and 1700 cases on their books. Yes, that would be eight or nine thousand people he guessed. There'd been a few less in September and a few more in October. He couldn't say why. Well about the winter, that was a question! There was a Jew firm from New York has bought the worsted Mill and were going to open in about two weeks--they said. They might be hiring as many as 700 by spring--the mill had worked that many when it ran before. They'd be mostly the women that worked there before. He'd try to get as many as he could off relief as soon as possible. The trouble was that nobody would cooperate. The Commissioner is rather hipped on health. He has insisted that all applicants for relief take a physical examination before they go on the rolls. This ruling has been in force since the first of November. That families on relief should continue to bring children into the world, particularly irks him. He thinks the doctors should do something about this. It is rumored that he gave orders to have such maternity cases as came to the hospital on relief, sterilized to prevent further additions to the relief load. I was told this by two different people but I did not have time to verify or to disprove it. He complains that the Health department is not cooperating with him, still so tar the condition of the families on relief was fine--better in fact than in normal times. But when I consulted the County Agent of the Child welfare she assured me that malnutrition was beginning to be very wide spread and that the state of dental decay was appalling and very little could be done about it. As she has the reputation of being both wise and conservative and is an experienced worker I think her statements would be more valuable than those of the Commissioner who has held this office less than two years. The moral law wasn't paid much attention to any more he thought. And drink too! A man'll give another man a drink when he won't give him a meal, and it's wood alcohol they get still. Several of 'em have gone blind. There is something so likable about the Commissioner which makes up for a good many disqualifications. He has a human way of handling some of the problems that come to him which I have not met elsewhere. Take for instance one big ex-fighter come to demand more relief who said the Commissioner couldn't put him out of his office and defied him to try. He told the man that he'd settle it that way if he'd go down to the cellar. Later the man came up spitting teeth and blood and said to his waiting comrades "Was that bird tough!" Probably this is why the Commissioner does not wear cuffs. As a matter of fact he seems to be very well liked by all the revolt groups. "They got as much right to talk as anyone" he says. There was a strike threatened last Summer by relief workers who thought they weren't getting enough, and he went out and argued with them and explained, and the strike didn't happen. He said to me that it must be vexing for a man on relief not to have any allowance to get a hair cut. "He ain't apt to be proud of the way his wife'd do it for him." And there was not having a cigaret and no tobacco allowance as he could light his pipe. The Commissioner's feeling toward the E. R. B. is far more bitter than their exasperation with him. He seems to have a congenital objection to anything connected with a college. He is also very jealous that the E. B. B. should have any sort of authority over him. The thinks that they are not only unnecessary but decidedly in the way. His dignity has been attacked and he resents it. There is little chance I think of his cooperating. What ideas he has appear to come from his case work supervisor, a brilliant excitable person, boiling with energy, who assured me that the "emergency" was over and that the present situation was what we had to expect for a long time. She may not be so far wrong as regards Jamestown. She insisted also that there was no use in so much investigating as was being done. The Families didn't like it. It demoralized them, and it was better to let them get a little more now and then than to do so much of it. The Welfare has three investigators for the 1700 cases, and if these case workers dislike their supervisor and their Commissioner as much as they are disliked, they have a hard time. But with only 3 investigators, and a supervisor set against their work it is easy to understand the annoyance of the E. R. The Commissioner agreed so heartily with the taxpayers that some of the work projects had better have been left alone, particularly the two parks, that I went to see four of their projects. The maligned park has become a lovely thing of which any city might be proud. The foreman--a big slow spoken Swede finishing his lunch on an apple--was immensely proud of the job. He led me to see the specially fine points of it, the wading pool, the bridges,--told me that some of the trees and shrubs had come from a nursery which belonged to the city, and that others the men had gone out to the woods and gathered in. He had had no trouble with the men. They didn't loaf on the job any more than anybody would. If he caught a fellow at it he asked him if he wanted to lose his job and go back on home relief, and that straightened him up right away. He said that the men were proud of the way the park looked. It was the same store that work relief is a job and a man stands straight under it--home relief is charity. Then I went to see the tract of land which the city uses for a dump. This has a stand of not very valuable trees, which are being felled and cut up for firewood for the relief cases. The foreman is a jolly robust lumber jack, a relief case himself, who knows how to "fall" trees and to manage men. This is to him a job that he loves not relief. He has just one thing to ask--that the two shifts of twenty men each who works under him should be provided with gloves so they wouldn't have to work with wet hands--the axes apt to slip and the wet was terrible for their hands. There is no substitute for a job. I talked with a woman who was trying to get work--any sort of work relief in order to get off home relief because her husband was on the verge of madness and suicide from the shame of it. "He's gone out of the house many times saying fuels not coming back and what I feel till I hear him coming in again." I did not in Jamestown make any visits to clients on Home relief. The situation in all the industrial towns which I have visited is so exactly the same--those "unworthy poor" contentedly accepting relief, and usually unemployable; those others bitterly chafing under it, ready to revolt if they see anything to be gained that way; and those sinking into an apathy which is perhaps worse. Jamestown graduates from its high schools and its three colleges an average of 500 boys and girls a year. For five years there have been no jobs for them, and for five years their parents have been steadily less able to provide them with the things they want. Practically nothing has been done for them except to give them food, shelter and clothes when their families are on home relief. There are no projects for them though there has been some effort to furnish them with recreation and further instruction. The passion for learning however does not appear to be strongly developed in these sons and daughters of mechanics who expected that their studies would give them a chance to earn a better living than their parents. As one of them said: "Why should I try and learn anything more when what I know now doesn't do me any good? I better practice on ditch digging, or get married and go on home relief." There is a tendency among these young people to grow listless and careless, to take relief for granted as the normal state of things, to become potential paupers and permanent charges on the community. There is said to be a great increase of mental instability among them, more commitments to the asylum in Gowanda. They have nothing to marry on of course and there were 85 unmarried mothers this year who were "first offenders." These were only those who came to the attention of the authorities. There is no record of these who were cared for privately. I could not discover whether the suicide rate had gone up. Neither Y. W. or Y. M. have offered any effective help. A very wise thing has been done in getting the cooperation instead of the opposition of the labor groups. Jamestown is not now and never has been a strong trade union town but there has been a mechanists group affiliated with the A. F. of L. for a long time. A leader in this union has been made personnel director for the work of the E. R. B. A man who has lived in town more than thirty years and apparently knows what every one in it can or cannot do. He determines what jobs those given work relief shall be assigned, and to all appearances he does it well. But the important thing is that he has persuaded the union not to protest at wages below their standard, or at the employment of non union men, or at union men working in other trades than their own. Something similar has been done by giving a place of importance in the welfare department to the man who apparently organized and certainly led a strike of metal workers and machinists which lasted 21 weeks in 1933. This group formed a new union of their own including men in a number of plants in Jamestown but not extending outside it. That union is apparently a little "redder" than the A. F. of L. crowd and this ex-leader is specially valuable just now in that he can and does influence his colleague in the matter of peace rather than fruitless revolt. I spent an hour with the Assessor and the Comptroller of the city. The assessor has just made a list of the plants--sixteen of them--which have been discontinued. Eight have been torn down, one has had the machinery removed and the shell of the building only left standing; four have moved away; one closed; one has gone bankrupt--and one has been sold for taxes. About 7500 were employed in these plants and by their elimination approximately 7500 jobs have been eliminated also. No rise in prosperity can restore them. There is a special reason for this aside from the general depression. Jamestown began its industrial career as a furniture town. It was surrounded by a stand of good timber and had water power enough to run a mill, and among the early settlers were a group of Swedish furniture makers About the wood-working factories other allied enterprises spring up--textile mills to weave upholstery material and metal works--fabric dyers brought from Albania; painters from Sicily. Then the only natural resource which Jamestown possessed, its lumber, was exhausted; water power became antiquated. The town had left only its trained labor supply as an industrial asset. In addition to the fact that the skilled labor was not so great an asset as it had once been, was the fact that it was believed to be in a dangerous mood. There was a large radical group both socialist and communist. Manufacturers felt that they could not count on contented employees. New industries are not coming to town and the workers do not follow their jobs to new locations because so many of them are anchored to Jamestown by the fact that they own their own homes. The 17,000 pieces of real estate in the city are owned by 13,000 people. I sum up the situation as it was done for me by one of the solid citizens whose wide experience and broad sympathies make him trusted by most groups in Jamestown. We must get down to the fact that our dreams of being a big industrial center cannot be realized. We cannot find work for as many people as we have now on the relief--not ever again. When we have got further along with recovery we can hope that the few factories which remain here will absorb some of them--not all by any means. Wages are high here--or they have been in normal times. Our workers are not going to be content with wages low enough to attract new industries. There were 700 Communist votes at the last election. There are easily 2,000 or 3,000 Communists here though many of them are not yet naturalized. They already hold the balance of power between the two parties. They could swing an election either way. A lot of them are on relief. So far they are as peaceful and law abiding as any citizens, but their attitude in a pinch is apt to be different. We have got to face the fact that we are not going to be able to push some thousands of our people back into industry here. They do not want to go away and if they did we would not know where to send them. We will have to keep more on relief then we have ever had before. How are we going to do it? I notice that Mr. Hopkins says that a town should look after its permanent poor--of course it should, but how? We've got to decide that pretty soon. And as for this kick against the TERA--do they ever think where we'd have been without it? If the Welfare Departments here, or anywhere else, had been able to handle their jobs would they have had to have the TERA? Stop grousing and pollyannaing; look at the sign posts and see where we are and then find out where we want to go from here before we find ourselves where we don't want to be!
|