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418 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1975)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0418 and id is 1 raw text is: PRE FACE This volume concerns itself with questions that are at the center of man's personal existence and also constitute the basic fabric of social business. While problems of work, jobs and income have always been the dominant compulsion of industrial life, the last few generations have been witness to the increasing expansion of governmental involvement in planning for economic growth and stability. The centrality of this concern to successive generations of Americans is manifested by a perusal of the archives of a publication such as THE ANNALS, which devoted special issues to topics such as labor legislation, current labor problems, problems of organized labor, child labor (three volumes), the improvement of labor conditions in the United States, labor and wages, women's work, and the settlement of labor disputes-all within the first decade of this century. While the major problems and issues of public attention shift, the emphasis upon man, society and work form a dominant emphasis of this journal during the past eight decades. Unemployment has always been a central issue in the discussions of political economy, confronting every generation with similar disputations regarding its definition, size, severity of impact, and relative significance as an issue of social policy. This volume speaks to all of these questions, but subsumes them within the framework of a broader commitment to full employment and to the principle that society has a responsibility to provide work for anyone who is willing and available for employment. Only when this idea is accepted can the discussion proceed to the specific details of planning for implementation. The impact of unemployment and the resultant primacy of a full employment goal was expressed with the greatest moral clarity by William Beveridge more than 30 years ago when he wrote: The proposition that there should be more vacant jobs than unemployed men means that the labor market should always be a seller's market rather than a buyer's market. For this . . . that society exists for the individual-there is a decisive reason of principle. The reason is that difficulty in selling labour has consequences of a different order of harmfulness from those associated with difficulty in buying labour. A person who has difficulty in buying labour that he wants suffers incon- venience or reduction of profits. A person who cannot sell his labour is in effect told that he is of no use. The first difficulty causes annoyance or loss. The other is a personal catastrophe.1 The neglect and waste of human abilities and talents is among the most pernicious of social evils, having consequences which redound not only to the individual, but affect every area of society. While these consequences are often concealed, disguised and ignored, the prevalence of this waste undermines the conditions necessary for both personal development and the stability of society. The consignment of increasingly large numbers of individuals to the status of unemployable, discouraged, elderly, and various other appellations which categorize people outside of the official labor supply, along with the increasingly higher rates of official unemployment which are judged 1. William H. Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1945), pp. 18-19. ix

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