The Unemployment Problem

"There are still too many people who want work and can't find a job," said Labor Secretary James Mitchell in a blunt talk last week to civic leaders in the industrial town of Granite City, 111. Mitchell is keenly aware that production has bounced back from the recession faster than employment. Result: highest January unemployment (4,724,000) since World War II's start, including 9.3% of the work force jobless in the most densely industrial state, New Jersey.

Behind scenes, Mitchell has been trying to get President Eisenhower and the Cabinet to tide the unemployed over until there is a step-up in hiring. He works against a firm deadline: April 1, when expiration of an Administration recession law will drop 320,000 workers--who have already used up their regular jobless pay --from special federal unemployment compensation lists. Hoping to do more than extend the emergency legislation, Mitchell has spelled out a plan for basic revision in the present patchwork of state compensation practices, all financed by the 3% U.S. payroll tax. By setting stiffer standards under which states qualify for their lion's share of this tax, Mitchell hopes to lengthen coverage to a uniform 30 weeks at half pay for the average worker who loses his job. But Mitchell has yet to get White House permission to present his proposal to Congress, where it will run into a variety of proposals already hoppered by Democrats.

Mitchell's sharpest setback came last week in the President's news conference. Asked about extension of the emergency law, Eisenhower came back with a broad negative. "I don't think this is the time to put the Federal Government back into a thing of this kind, this kind of function, when we are on a curve of rising prosperity." To which Mitchell's allies reply: the soundest way to head off pump-priming pressures is to strengthen unemployment protection until employment rides along up the curve.

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