Progress in Coordination of State and Federal Collection of Labor Statistics

Abstract

No doubt the real duty of the speaker is to divest himself of presuppositions, but, falling short of that, he should state those that color his vision. I accept the fact that we have a State-Federal Government and that this political fact will have to be reckoned with in any proposed statistical set-up. I think it is well that the President, the Secretary of Labor, and many others in the Federal Government have had State training. It is well that those who now find themselves on the sending end, are able to carry over the results of their experiences on the receiving end. It is rather amusing to discover how utterly different is the point of view of some members of the Federal staff whose work has been confined to the Federal Government. Without pausing for illustrations of this, I can indicate the Washington point of view by the fact that though our theory of government makes the Governor of a State analogous to a king and the Senator analogous to his ambassador, nevertheless according to Washington etiquette, the Senator as part of the Federal Government enters the dining room before the Governor. Not merely in recognition of the States, but because of the value of regional statistical offices there is need for solving the StateFederal problem. In a number of the highly centralized governments of Europe, with much smaller areas, there are branch statistical offices recognized as an indispensable part of the statistical set-up. Perhaps our state lines are awkward and we should prefer industrial prefectures, but we are on fairly sure ground in saying that a Federal-State pattern has both political and statistical significance. Having said this we might as well admit that during the past year or two the tide has been running the other way. Drastic retrenchments within the States plus national approaches to industrial problems through National Recovery Administration code activities have made the livest question seem to be, How can we integrate the work of NRA, the Bureau of the Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, etc.? Successive forms of this difficult problem have been placed on the doorstep of the Central Statistical Board. In September 1933, NRA Office Order 1-A directed that reports on employment, pay rolls, man-hours, etc., should be submitted both to Code Authorities and to the Bureau of the Census, with avail233