the applicant and the technicalities of sending workers to Government jobs or work projects.

If these employees of labor departments are to become the victims of changing administrations, and if these employment offices are to become the agency for finding jobs for party workers, then I am sure that the public employment offices cannot serve their purpose and should be eliminated.

If you have had the same difficulty as I have had in Iowa, you will know that the creation and building of a working organization in the labor department and in the employment service is a slow, difficult, and painful proposition. We do not have a State civil-service commission in Iowa, and I have no experience with State civil-service procedure. I have had, however, an experience with the merit system as required in the employment service by regulations of the United States Employment Service. In the fall of 1934, after the Iowa State Employment Service had been operating for 5 or 6 months, the United States Employment Service sent its representative to Iowa to conduct examinations. I had picked out a group of men and women who had served for these 5 or 6 months. I thought they were fairly good people. Some of them I knew to be excellent. I had some doubt as to whether the persons selected by the examination process would be better than those I had selected. It has worked out, however, that these people are, with some exceptions, good people. They have taken readily to training. They have shown themselves to be adapted to meet changing requirements and have done a pretty fair job. These merit people assumed duties in our offices January 1, 1935. They have been trained and have been enthusiastic about their work. They still are, however, not so proficient as I would like to have them. They still leave gaps in the employment histories of applicants; that is, some of them do. They have made good progress with many employers and are getting a large number of employer orders, but they still are not getting as many as they could. They still have a long period of development ahead of them before maximum results will have been achieved.

The point I am making in discussing these employees is that they exemplify my statement that changing administration and changing personnel cause lost momentum and lost efficiency. They have been on the job for more than a year and a half. They still do not satisfy either me or my administrative staff. They are still being trained and lectured and talked to. They are still receiving an education. about their work. They are doing a much better job now than they did do, but after more than 18 months the job they are doing can still be improved. If these people in 18 months' time are still learning, are still working at the mastery of their job, then to replace them with new employees is to cost the State the expense of training the new

workers to the status of efficiency of the old, and to waste 18 months in training and vitalizing a new organization.

It is anticipated, and the Federal Social Security Act requires, that payment of unemployment compensation shall be made solely through public employment offices in a State or such other agencies as the Board may approve. I do not believe that any thinking person will deny that State employment services should function within and be a part of State bureaus or commissions of labor. Thus I can say that civilservice requirements in State labor departments will become more vital as time goes on. It is expected and required that unemployment-compensation benefits shall be disbursed through the employment service. Such a requirement will impose on the personnel of public employment offices an increased responsibility for knowing their job. The successful operation of unemployment compensation is going to depend upon paying out as little in the way of compensation for unemployment as possible.. That is to say, efficient administration will mean finding a job for an unemployed man entitled to receive benefits before his waiting period expires, so that the unemployed man can make more money than he would draw from unemployment, thus eliminating the necessity for paying benefits.

As I look at this problem of finding jobs, I can see that our unemployment-compensation administration is not going to be good if we can hunt only a packing job for a man who has done packing and a sock-knitting job for a sock knitter or a glove-sewing job for a glove sewer, and so on. The day is coming when our interviewers in employment offices must be able, not only to select workers from the past experience of such workers in a fixed pursuit, but also to determine the aptitude, dexterity, and mental viewpoint of the worker; so that if there is no opening available to him in one occupation, the aptitude, dexterity, and mental condition of the worker, as determined by the interviewer, will show him to be fitted for a similar job but not the one he has been doing. These men we have had in the employment service for 18 months cannot do that now as well as they should. Good employment people for the special requirements of the Social Security Act cannot be found; they must be trained, and they cannot be made. into good people in a day or a month or a year or 2 years. The unemployment-compensation section of the Social Security Act has been adopted into the laws of several States already. I do not think I am being forward in saying that these workers in the employment service are going to be required to know an all-inclusive number of things about factories and manufactures and processes and machines, and by the same token know as much about workers who make those factories and manufactures and machines operate. These people are going to be required to ferret out of each applicant every fact which re'ates to employment ability. They are going to be required to know when there is no possible job opening available to an unemployed

person. They are going to be required to say when a man is unemployed so as to be entitled to compensation benefits.

I cannot believe that there can be any satisfactory working of the employment service, or of the State laws in respect to unemployment compensation, unless the workers who make the administration of such offices and laws a success are allowed to stay on the job to professionalize and work to the high degree of efficiency it will require. The only answer to the development of employment-office personnel to such a standard will be that such personnel is civil-service and selected specifically for ability to do a hard, exacting, complicated job. In some States, undoubtedly, there will be added to the responsibility of the labor department supervision over or connection with the tribunal, court, or claim-reviewing agency that is to pass upon the validity of the workers' claims to unemployment compensation. In some States the legislature also requires a court operating in conjunction with the labor department to hear disputes with respect to claims, hours of labor, etc.

The personnel, which is to be fair, impartial, and just to worker or employer in these cases, cannot function efficiently unless it has the benefit of its own experience. The handling of these cases resolves itself into a cumulative fund of knowledge that cannot be acquired by a newcomer each year or 2 years or 4 years.

The investigator who must check up on law violations needs the wisdom of cumulative experience.

Again I am wondering why we labor commissioners, at the time of taking office, invariably find such a great maze of work undone so many laws only partially enforced. Yet I do not believe there is cause for wonderment if our personnel is appointive with each new administration. Does the investigator or the inspector do a proper job when he knows between November and July that he is to lose that job in July? Does the executive head of the department relax his vigilence. and abate his interest in his task? It would seem so when the offenders against the health and safety laws are guilty at recurring intervals of the same offense for which they were brought to task during different years in the past.

I hope I have made clear the position that recognition should and must be given to experience and specific job training on the job if our departments are to operate efficiently in the interests of the security, health, and welfare betterment of the working men, women, and youngsters who are our responsibilities in these respects.

Chairman FLETCHER. We are now to hear from Commissioner Murphy, of the Oklahoma Department of Labor.

Mr. MURPHY. Mine is the other side of the story, as I see it, and what I say is based on my own experience in Oklahoma. I am now serving my third 4-year term as commissioner. There are people in

the department now who have been working there since I first went into the department. The only merit system we have is in the employment-service division. What I am going to say is based entirely on my personal experience, having been connected with the department of labor since May 1, 1917, starting as a factory inspector, then chief factory inspector, assistant commissioner of labor for 9%1⁄2 years, and since 1926 commissioner of labor.

Our observation is that an adequately financed, properly and fairly administered State department of labor is of equal importance with that of governor. The commissioner of labor should be from the ranks of organized labor, because they have advocated and been instrumental in the enactment of all progressive labor legislation; he should be elected by the people of his or her State, owing his allegiance to all the people rather than being hampered by a reactionary appointing authority; and he should have full authority to appoint the personnel of all branches of his or her department and be big enough to administer the duties of his or her office in a fair and impartial manner, for the reason that we bave the extreme radical in the labor movement and the extreme reactionary in the employer class, both important but neither of them right. Somewhere between these two elements is right. Therefore, the commissioner of labor, in carrying out the duties of his or her office in a fair and impartial manner, necessarily becomes the balance-wheel between employer and employee and must assume a very great personal responsibility in order best to serve all the people and to maintain peace in the industrial life of his State.

The Department of Labor in Oklahoma is one of the several departments of the State that was established by the constitutional convention. The commissioner of labor is elected by the people of the State for a term of 4 years. His department is made up of the administrative office and four divisions-statistics, arbitration and conciliation, free employment, and factory inspection. These represent all the State boards dealing directly with labor and industrial problems, except the State industrial commission which administers the workmen's-compensation law, and the chief mine inspector, who has jurisdiction over and administers the general mining laws of the State, which have been made separate departments of the State government.

The direction of the department of labor is vested in the commissioner of labor, he being the administrative and executive head of the department, and being entrusted with the enforcement of all laws, rules, and regulations which come within the jurisdiction of his department. He is authorized to organize the work in the different divisions, appoint and remove the staff personnel, direct all investigations and inspections, and make rules and regulations for the execution of the work. In general he determines the policy of the department.

Bureau of labor statistics. Our present-day business and industrial world demands more and more statistical information in order that it may arrange plans for the morrow. Labor and industrial statistics are very important in our present-day economics, in the matter of collecting and publishing not only of detailed reports on the commercial, industrial, educational, and sanitary conditions of the people, including the mining, transportation, commercial, mechanical, and manufacturing industries of the State, but also of employment and pay-roll data. This information not only reflects the economic conditions of the wage earner, but affords a broad index of the market purchasing power, and therefore has a most important relation to community prosperity and is a means of showing basic trends of standards affecting business activities and economic life.

State board of arbitration and conciliation.-The State board of arbitration and conciliation is composed of two farmers and one employer appointed by the governor upon his own motion. Upon recommendation of the commissioner of labor the governor appoints one employer and two employees, all six of them with the advice and consent of the senate. The commissioner of labor is chairman of the board and the assistant commissioner of labor is secretary of the board by virtue of their respective offices.

Bureau of free employment. The free employment service is the human-relations department of the State government in the department of labor. It deals with people, not as groups, but as personalities, and in the two most economic classifications, employer and employee. Bureau of factory inspection-accident prevention.-First and foremost, prevention of accidents means increased production. Injury to those who are accomplished in their particular line of endeavor means the training of others, and this alone means a decrease in production, not to say anything about the suffering and privation it often means to those dependent upon the workers for support or the probability of their becoming public charges on society.

Enforcement of labor laws rests largely upon the principle of regular inspection of industrial establishments. Many dangerous or unlawful conditions are called to the attention of the department by publicspirited citizens, but only through regular inspection work is the protection afforded by statute for employees in the industrial establishments of the State made possible.

Compliance with laws and regulations is secured for the safeguarding of dangerous machinery, such as measures to control power-transmission equipment by emergency stopping devices, the safeguarding of gears, sprockets, chains, belts and pulleys, set screws, keys, clutches having projecting parts, shafting, couplings, collars, and fly wheels.

Protection of the eyesight and of the hands and fingers exposed at the point of operation figure prominently in this work. Injuries. of this type are of the permanent partial character and arise largely