Jasper County Democrat, Volume 12, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 August 1909 — BOYS SCORN TO BEGIN WORK FOR SMALL PAY. [ARTICLE]

BOYS SCORN TO BEGIN WORK FOR SMALL PAY.

Frank W. Clouds, the clerk in the office of the state statistician, who has charge of the free employment bureau recently established, according to legislatuive requirement, is making a study of the young American who has a desire to be a wage earner, and his deductions are not at all flattering to the future of the youngster of fifteen or sixteen years, who has no prospects except what his two hands are able to make for him. “The average boy of that age who comes in here,” said Mr. Clouds, “is possessed of the idea that he ought to be making good wages from the start. Most of them have had no experience in any regular line of work. One came in the other day who had just turned fifteen years, he said, and he wanted a job. He had no one depending on him for support. I had a call from a machine shop for a willing boy who desired to learn the 'machinist’s trade, and I sent the caller to the shop. He returned in a short time, with ‘the declaration that the place paid only $4 a week, and that he didn’t propose to work for that. “I tried to make him understand that, although he could get only that amount at this time, the company was undertaking to train him to operate a machine so that in time he could be earning as much as that every day, but he wouldn’t listen, and left here to look for a job on his own account. He was of the type of boys of that age who come in here and wish jobs that will pay from $9 to sl2 a week and who never stop to think that the jobs will be paying them the same wages twenty years from now if they stay with them. It Is no wonder to me that our list of applications from common laborers is growing so rapidly. & “Men in desperate need of work are among the callers at the office. I had a caller early this week who declared that he would not try to keep up the fight longer than Thursday of this week. He was a millwright, he said, and was not able to find any employment in his line. I told him he ought to be able to handle some structural steel Jobs we had but he thought not. I sent him to a mill where they wanted a man, but he returned and informed me that the mill had just been sold, and that after a day’s work, he had been discharged to make way for the new men who came in with the pew owner. ‘Thursday’s my limit,’ he said, as he left the office- ‘lf something doesn’t come by that time it will be all up with me.”—lndianapolis News.