The Expenditure of the Unemployed

Abstract

U TNEMPLOYMENT and relief bring in their train a number of attendant problems. What happens to the living conditions of the unemployed? When they lose their jobs, are they destitute? If so, does relief mitigate the situation so that they and their families can live with some decency? Is their standard of living reduced? What items suffer? Is their consumption, particularly of food, so reduced that they tend to lose their working efficiency? Some of these questions receive at least partial answers for a limited sample and district from the data presented in this paper. In fact, the value of the study lies as much in showing what information may be obtained by an investigation of this sort, as in the conclusions themselves. The families studied are part of the large unemployed population whom it was the aim of the relief administration to assist. They are families in Massachusetts whose chief wage earner had lost his regular job and had applied for relief. The Cambridge sample is, indeed, composed of 397 relief applicants who were on the A list of the Cambridge branch of the ERA. All of them had not yet received relief when the investigation took place, but they were considered urgently in need of relief. The unemployed families in the four small towns were all actually in receipt of relief. The Cambridge families were not, however, totally unemployed. In most cases, some member of the family had a job, usually temporary, the income from which was considered insufficient to support the family. The majority of the chief wage earners were day laborers or factory workers,' most of whom (6i%) had not gone beyond the eighth grade in school. Only 3% had gone beyond twelve years of schooling. The same was true of the homemakers, usually the wives; 67% had six to eight years of schooling, and 2% more than twelve. The average age of the chief wage earner was 40, that of the homemaker, 46. It is well, therefore, to keep in mind that we are dealing with a group of laboring families, whose education included only grammar school, and whose adult members were entering into middle age.