Unemployment Insurance and Work Relief

Abstract

Stimulated by the Social Security Act of I935, every state in the Union has passed unemployment insurance legislation. While a system of state plans rather than one nation-wide system was adopted primarily to circumvent constitutional limitations, proponents of the former argued that a system composed of 48 or more independent units would provide greater opportunity for experimentation in an attempt to devise the most economical and effective system, than could be possible under one nation-wide system. At the present time the different state agencies administering the unemployment insurance acts are overburdened with the task of getting the administrative machinery functioning. Because of the depressed state of business activity, resulting in considerable unemployment of insured workers at this time, it is likely that for some time in the near future the administrators will have little