Page:Chicago Race Riots (Sandburg, 1919).djvu/28

18 men at 45 cents an hour; Turbell Ice Cream company, four men at $19 a week.

A bulletin of the office for June 25 states:

"Unskilled work is plentiful. Jobs in foundries and steel mills, in building and construction work, in light factories and packing houses, keep up a steady demand for semi-skilled laborers."

During 1918 there was a total of 30,000 applications for jobs, and 10,600 persons were placed.

It is believed a record somewhat like this will be maintained again this year; that is, a steady influx of colored population, almost entirely from southern states, will keep on coming and will be absorbed by northern industry. The amount of this influx will not be as large as in the last year or two, but it is expected to be steady. It will have the same steady flow, according to men closely in touch with it, as the stream of immigration from Europe that kept coming to America's shores with such periodic certainty before the war.

Among large employing interests as well as in both white and colored labor circles the expectation is that the northern labor supply will be constantly replenished from the south. The reasons for this are found in conditions described by the immigration and inspection service of the department of labor in a report not as yet made public. From Dr. George Edwin Haynes, a colored man who took a master's degree at Yale and Ph. D. at Columbia, and who is a director of negro economics in the department of labor, comes an advance report on these conditions, as follows:

"Among alien residents in our country large numbers intend to return to their native land. The principal cause is a desire to learn what has befallen their families.