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Give the Returned Soldier a Job and Pay Him What He Earns

By Samuel Harden Church
President of Carnegie Institute

I HAVE often wondered what I would do if I were to find myself suddenly out of employment with the necessity confronting me of hunting a wage-paying job in order to provide for my family. I cannot imagine any situation that would be more discouraging. I have always, therefore, been careful to receive every person who has ever called upon me in the search for employment, and if unable to find a position for him in any department under my own direction, I have referred him to others or made such suggestions as would lead these applicants into other promising fields of work.

I have never found myself in sympathy with a tendency which has been developing in recent years in some of the industrial establishments of the country, whereby an age limit was set up against applicants for work. This age limit was at first made thirty-five years, and then, when it was found that a sufficient supply of men could not be obtained, it was raised to forty-five years. My feeling is that there should never be any age limit at all, and I feel convinced that the social ideals for which we are all striving will never be accomplished until it becomes possible for every man and every woman upon their own application to find employment suitable to their respective abilities, with a corresponding wage.

The business men who are directing our great establishments have up to a recent time felt themselves impelled, as for example, is done in the army, to demand a physical perfection of one hundred per cent, from their employees, and we can readily see how such a policy will shut out from a livelihood many thousands of men and women who are physically defective in one way or another, or who have passed the arbitrary age limit, and yet are capable of giving intelligent and devoted service in any tasks which might be assigned to them.

Very recently I have had personal experience with two defective cases of this kind. The first was that of a young man whose sight, through a disease in childhood, had been impaired by the loss of seventy-five per cent, of his vision. He was unusually bright mentally and strong physically, and had completed the course in chemical engineering, which made him adaptable to some of the most important forms of industrial work. The oculists were able to supply glasses which corrected his vision so that with this aid it was almost normal, but when I sent him to one of our captains of industry with a letter of recommendation, the answer came back that he had been put through an eye-test without his glasses and rejected because of the possible risk of injury to his person which might ensue from his movements among the machinery of the plant. When the war brought on a shortage of labor, however, this young man found employers who were eager for his services and he is now occupying a responsible position in one of the largest establishments of the country.

The other case was that of a young man who when a child had been run over by a train, with the loss of both of his legs above the knees. He came into my office wearing artificial legs, which did not seem to fit him any too well, and walking more or less laboriously with a cane. He was just the kind of applicant whose physical appearance would cause nine men out of ten to tell him they had nothing for him to do, and yet he had in him a human heart, an intelligent brain, and a rightful ambition to succeed In life. I had no place for him but I kept him going the rounds until finally in this same shortage of labor he found employment as an engraver's apprentice, and he is now learning that trade.

I have described these two cases because they illustrate a common attitude of employers toward the defective members of our race. It calls up Burns' piteous line, "Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn." We are now face to face with the necessity of furnishing immediate employment to increasing numbers of maimed and wounded soldiers who have had their bodies more or less destroyed as they have rushed into the war to defend their country.

If my two young friends, the one with his defective vision, the other with his legless trunk, could be absorbed so easily in useful work, why is it not just as reasonable to call upon the employers of labor In every avenue of human industry to take their share of this defective soldier labor and apply and develop it as far as it will go in each case? If the output is not up to the standard let the pay be so much for so much. But when your son -- when my son -- comes home with his body shattered in the hell and death of battle, let him never go begging for a job. Let the job be ready for him -- so many jobs for so many shattered men at so many shops, all the time. We must not reject them in an arrogant exercise of power, we must not debase them by the proffer of charity -- we must give them the job.

The maximum age limit must go. It has no right of existence in human society, and the old policy of rejecting all applicants except those who are physically perfect must give way to that higher sense of human responsibility whereby every employer of labor must find himself face to face with the age-long cry of conscience that he is not the selfish master of the little field In which he finds himself for a short moment In charge, but that he is, indeed, that higher sympathetic and reciprocal being whose honorable relation to the business life of America finds its full interpretation in the old phrase, "My brother's keeper."