Hidden Unemployment

Scarcity of labor was a factor in the economics of slavery in the United States.
As new territories were opened and Federal land sales conducted, land had to be
cleared and new homesteads established. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants
annually came to the U.S. and found jobs digging canals and building railroads. Almost
all work during most of the 19th century was done by hand or with horses, mules, or
oxen, because there was very little mechanization. The workweek during most of the
19th century was 60 hours. Unemployment at times was between one and two percent.
The tight labor market was a factor in productivity gains allowing workers to maintain or
increase their nominal wages during the secular deflation that caused real wages to rise
at various times in the 19th century, especially in the final decades.
20th Century
There were labor shortages during WW I. Ford Motor Co. doubled wages to reduce
turnover. After 1925 unemployment began to gradually rise.
The decade of the 1930s saw the Great Depression impact unemployment across the
globe. One Soviet trading corporation in New York averaged 350 applications a day
from Americans seeking jobs in the Soviet Union. [121] In Germany the unemployment
rate reached nearly 25% in 1932.
In some towns and cities in the north east of England, unemployment reached as high
as 70%; the national unemployment level peaked at more than 22% in
1932. Unemployment in Canada reached 27% at the depth of the Depression in
1933. In 1929, the U.S. unemployment rate averaged 3%.
In the U.S., the Works Progress Administration (1935–43) was the largest make-work
program. It hired men (and some women) off the relief roles ("dole") typically for
unskilled labor.
In Cleveland, Ohio, the unemployment rate was 60%; in Toledo, Ohio, 80%.There were
two million homeless people migrating across the United States. Over 3 million
unemployed young men were taken out of the cities and placed into 2600+ work camps
managed by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Unemployment in the United Kingdom fell later in the 1930s as the depression eased,
and remained low (in six figures) after World War II.
Fredrick Mills found that in the U.S., 51% of the decline in work hours was due to the fall
in production and 49% was from increased productivity. By 1972 unemployment in the
UK had crept back up above 1,000,000, and was even higher by the end of the decade,
with inflation also being high. Although the monetarist economic policies of Margaret
Thatcher's Conservative government saw inflation reduced after 1979, unemployment
soared in the early 1980s, exceeding 3,000,000—a level not seen for some 50 years—
by 1982. This represented one in eight of the workforce, with unemployment exceeding
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