Jobs in the Making

All large Jewish communities, facing as they do burning job-finding problems for our younger and adult population, feel the need of centralized “placement” activity. Such activity, it has been repeatedly pointed out, would eliminate the rivalry and competition between the individual organizations and agencies engaged in “placement” with its resultant senseless duplication of effort and energy.

Our backward, overlapping and narrow-minded employment bureaus are forces of retrogression, causes of maladjustment in a community undergoing significant social and economic changes. Partly by reason of such deficiency the Jewish community, sad to say, suffers from unemployment, vocational maladjustment and their attendant social and economic evils.

FEDERATION ACTS FOR UNIFICATION

Fortunately, an initial step was taken recently in New York by eight employment agencies subsidized by the New York Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies to effect a long overdue unification in the work of these organizations. The central bureau was given the name of Federation Employment Service. Beside the Y. M. H. A., the Jewish Board of Guardians, and a few other special agencies, engaged in “industrial placement,” the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish charities was also included in the final draft of the central Jewish employment service in Greater New York.

The new plan calls for the liquidation of the existing employment services, whatever their nature, and the merger of all these bureaus into a single centrally located and centrally administered agency. It also calls for the coordination of other community efforts, such as the committees interested in specific phases of the Jewish employment problem, like discrimination, German refugees, research in occupations, etc.

NAME TIES SERVICE TO CONTROL CHARITIES

The name Federation Employment Service in a way identifies the new service with our central community organization, the New York Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies. It also serves the purpose of achieving recognition in the business world of the new service as a central Jewish agency.

Specifically, the trade division chairmen of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, who act as leaders in their trades for special Federation funds, may as well be made the focal points of employer contact between the central employment service on the one side and the various trades or industry on the other.

A central employment agency, such as the Federation Employment Service, must provide for a central administration not only of placement, but of vocational guidance and research.

WILL GATHER VITAL STATISTICS ON JEWS

An attempt will be made by it to build up a body of special information on which scientific vocational guidance may be based, as for instance, a survey of typical Jewish industries, psychological studies of Jewish occupational interests, employment trends, professional opportunities for Jews, etc.

Occupational redistribution and redirection of the Jews in New York can be attained by the use of scientific methods in vocational guidance, such as psychological tests for intelligence, aptitudes, personality, interests, etc.; information about training opportunities, estimates of absorptive capacity of an occupation by surveys of past trends and trend changes.

SEES NEED FOR STANDARDIZED FORMS

Of special importance is the need for a standard registration form and for standardizing other questionnaire forms so that comparable data may be obtained from all the centers of large Jewish population. This will aid materially in research in the field of Jewish occupations, interests, choices, etc.

Of course, under the category of placement and vocational guidance the fundamental functions of a central employment service include job finding, vocational training and follow-up, occupational counselling, retraining establishment in business, loans, “sheltered” employment, etc.

Thus the new Jewish employment service may be able, in cooperation with the State Education Department, to set up commercial and trade training classes, as a first step in realizing the advice given in vocational guidance.

WHAT TRAINING CLASSES MUST EMPHASIZE

The emphasis in these classes should be twofold. First, the acquisition of new skills of a commercial or mechanical sort for adults who have seen their old skill become defunct due to technical changes in industry; second, the giving of daily practice to those whose skills tend to decline without practice, like secretarial workers.

Finally, a bulletin of vocational information and guidance service for Jewish students in high schools and for Jewish schools may reach Jewish youth early enough to break down the resistance which is attached, in the eyes of the majority of Jews, to certain unconventional occupations.

CAN COOPERATE WITH STATE SERVICE

The new central Jewish employment office can cooperate with the so-called clearance system of the New York State Employment Service. Through this device, jobs that have gone unfilled during the course of the day are referred to all the non-commercial co-operating agencies to be worked upon the following morning.

Of still greater importance is the possible cooperation between Jewish social agencies and government agencies and government services with the view of Jewish vocational retraining. Jewish unemployed endure many specific handicaps just because they are Jews. Our economically active population is distributed in increasingly crowded economic fields. In its turn this fact, bad in itself, sharpens the newest impact of historical forces of very long standing, to wit: prejudices against the Jew and the intention to make him play the sadly familiar scapegoat role in times of unsettlement.

In the cooperation of Jewish central agencies with State education and placement services there may be discovered many untapped resources for the vocational self-redirection of the Jew. And this occupational change is the best remedy against the danger of Jewish concentration in middle-class occupations and of the glaring lack of opportunity for the growing Jewish youth.