Meeting the Risk of Unemployment: Changing Societal Responses

Unemployment is enforced idleness among persons who are willing and able to work. Unemployment was not a serious problem until the Industrial Revolution produced a more complicated, interdependent, impersonal society. Unemployment may be classified according to its cause as aggregate, selective or structural, and personal. Un employment rates vary greatly according to business condi tions ; they also vary greatly among different classes of the population. Most unemployment currently lasts less than fifteen weeks. Until the Great Depression society did little to help the unemployed. Friends and relatives were the major outside sources of support, other sources being private chari ties, public relief, and employer or trade union plans. The Great Depression produced the highest unemployment rates ever experienced and a climate favoring federal intervention. The Social Security Act of 1935 encouraged the formation of state unemployment insurance programs, now only one of several government and private efforts to control unemploy ment or alleviate its economic consequences. The current principal control measures are: (1) monetary and fiscal policy designed to reduce unemployment, (2) automatic stabilizers, (3) manpower development and training, (4) labor-market information, and (5) public employment. The principal al leviative measures are unemployment insurance, public as sistance, and private employee benefit plans, unemployment insurance being clearly the most important.