refinishing and upholstering of furniture.

He is now in that business, and is

making more money than he did before the injury.

A worker with a wife and two children lost both hands in an industrial accident. He complained that he and his family couldn't live on the amount of the weekly compensation. The civilian rehabilitation service found out that both he and his wife had a very good knowledge of farming. A suitable farm was purchased for him, which, with the assistance of his wife and family he has operated with such success as to give him a larger income than he had before the injury.

A workman who had lost an eye and received other bodily injuries that greatly impaired his ability to work found it difficult to obtain employment. Under the supervision of the civilian rehabilitation service he was given a course in shoe repairing. He has built up a good business in shoe repairing, and is also selling a line of shoes. His income now is much larger than it was before his injury.

A workman who had lost a leg experienced great difficulty in learning to use an artificial limb. The civilian rehabilitation service gave him attention until he learned to use the artificial limb. In this case they also found a rooming house which provided a very suitable opportunity for this man and his family to increase their income. Their net monthly income from the rooming house is $250 a month. The maximum weekly compensation is $18.75.

In all these cases the industrial commission of Ohio furnished the money to purchase property or maintain the workers and their families during the period of training. All the labor and responsibility of the rehabilitation work was assumed by the civilian rehabilitation service of the State department of vocational education.

The good work that is now being done by the civilian rehabilitation service could be greatly amplified if sufficient means were provided by Congress and State legislatures and greater cooperation could be secured on the part of employers. I think it will surprise employers to find what little risk they take when they employ handicapped workers. In the State of Ohio, where more than 1,500,000 claims for compensation have been filed, there are only 40 cases of workers who received a second injury that permanently and totally disabled them. But even in these cases the employer, in whose service the worker was engaged at the time of the second injury, is responsible only for the compensation provided by law for the second injury. If the second injury makes the worker a permanent and totally disabled person the compensation for such permanent total disability is paid from the catastrophe reserve fund of the State insurance fund, and no penalization is imposed upon the employer in whose service the worker was engaged at the time of the second injury.

Whether judged from a humanitarian, economic, or patriotic standpoint, this rehabilitation work deserves the support and encouragement of all citizens, for, by reducing accidents and rehabilitating disabled workers, we contribute to the conservation of the peace and stability of society by lessening the cases of discontent.

In these days of big business it is impossible for the average man to engage in a business of his own, and he must therefore depend for his means of livelihood upon those who control the avenues of employment. If, in pursuing the only opportunity he has to acquire subsistence for himself and family, a man is needlessly exposed to loss of health, limb, and life, or if he is denied opportunity to earn money because of a handicapped condition resulting from injury, he is going to feel that he is the unfortunate victim of conditions that are beyond his control. This is likely to make him bitter, fill him with hatred of those who control industry, and make him a fit subject for revolutionary propaganda. Hence we can see that the work of preventing industrial accidents and diseases and of rehabilitating disabled workers involves not only the welfare of those engaged in hazardous occupations but also the comfort and happiness of the Nation's homes, the security of industry, and the peace and stability of society.

Chairman WRIGHT. The next speaker, Mr. R. H. Lansburg, secretary of labor and industry for the State of Pennsylvania, will speak to you on "Rehabilitation as a conservation factor in industry." Mr. Lansburg.

REHABILITATION AS A CONSERVATION FACTOR IN INDUSTRY

R. H. LANSBURG, Secretary of Labor and Industry, Pennsylvania

A brief survey of American industrial history is extremely illuminating in indicating the economic desirability of rehabilitation in American industry. Such a survey will quickly demonstrate that just as conservation of natural resources has been a permanent national question for 20 years, so conservation of man power through industrial rehabilitation will necessarily now and hereafter be important. It is not surprising to find alongside of the waste of material resources which occurred without check in the United States for so many years that there was a waste of man power equal to or greater than the waste of material things. The whole economic philosophy of the Nation at that time was based on the thought that resources were practically unlimited. If trees, or coal, or oil, or farm lands were used or destroyed there were always more available in portions. of the United States as yet relatively untouched. If man power was destroyed through industrial accident or improper conditions of industrial employment, more man power was readily available at low cost from the hordes of immigrants that were yearly increasing in numbers.

Little thought was given to a conservation of the human resources of the Nation. Machinery had come into greater and greater use in

industry. The entire economic structure of the Nation was being placed on a machine basis. The machine was being regarded as of paramount importance. That the industrial usefulness of workers should now and again be destroyed by the machine was regarded in the light of a necessary consequence of modern industry. If a worker thus became incapacitated for further employment, the community would take care of him through the almshouse and his family could expect to receive any proper aid from charity. At the same time that industry was carefully conserving by-products developed in the course of manufacture, incapacitated workers were shunted off by it into the community without thought of rehabilitation. Although the reclamation of by-products in material was well under way by 1890, it was 1920 before any real progress had been made in the reclamation of men who were injured in industrial accidents. Such conditions were before the time of workmen's compensation laws, before the safety movement became the factor in industrial life, and before industrial rehabilitation received any consideration. Although industry has been gradually developing on a machine basis every since the industrial revolution of a hundred years ago, the extent of the development of the machine during the last 10 years has been very much more rapid than ever before, and the prospects of the 10 years to come indicate that we shall have more intricate and more automatic machines in our industry than would have been dreamed of 25 years ago. As industrial processes have become more mechanical in their operation, the real need for man power has become less, but the chance that the worker will be injured at his daily job has become greater.

Any number of illustrations of this trend can be found but the following will suffice to prove the point. The development of electrical cranes has decreased the number of persons required to handle material through the shop, but there is an increased hazard unless these machines are very carefully operated. Likewise, conveying machinery is one of the great causes of industrial accidents and such machinery has replaced manual labor as has no other in and around the yards of our industrial establishments. Likewise, one of the most important causes of industrial accidents to-day is the automobile. That this mechanism represents an increased hazard will not be disputed. Construction of tall buildings, the erection of huge suspension bridges, or the digging of subways create new and unsolved industrial hazards which combine in causing the number of industrial accidents to increase regardless of safety precautions.

The Nation permits restriction of immigration and adopts it as a policy, not only because of the desirability of assimilation of the diversified racial groups already in the country, but largely because the machine basis which our industries have achieved no longer

makes necessary large masses of unskilled laborers. Restriction of immigration places our man power on essentially the same basis as our material resources, namely, availability in strictly limited quantity. This condition will make it necessary, over a period of time, that incapacitated persons be trained through rehabilitation to fill positions which are within the capabilities that remain after their injury, while fully able-bodied persons are released for more general activities.

There has grown up in industry through the development of the personnel movement, appreciation of the costs of training industrial workers and of the responsibility of the employer in the industrial system to his employees, at the same time that there has developed a community appreciation of the fact that the almshouse and charity is neither the humane nor the cheap way of dealing with the worker who has been broken by industry before his time. The attention which has been given to the costs of labor turnover through the personnel movement illustrates costs which are attendant to the replacement of workers injured through industrial accidents and provides the basis for much of the profit-making side of industrial rehabilitation.

All these trends and all modern points of view, therefore, point to industrial rehabilitation as a direct conservation factor in the economic life of our country. Making a physically incapacitated worker once more fit to resume the position of wage earner in our economic society, not only is due the worker himself, not only is a measure of justice to his dependents, but is a factor of great importance in relieving his community of unnecessary financial burden and of preserving and conserving the time and money that the community and society at large has already spent training the worker for his industrial contacts.

The cost of training the worker can not be measured alone in terms of the particular job at hand. If immigration were unrestricted and a new man was ready to step into the place of the old one who had just been tossed into the industrial scrap heap through accident, the community cost of training the new man must include far more items than merely the cost of breaking him in on a particular job in a particular establishment. The cost of developing a new member of our complex industrial society has never been measured and probably can never be measured. But there can be no question that the maladjustments caused by failure to see this problem are being felt in our larger cities in the cost of keeping the second generation in check and sometimes in jail.

It may seem a far cry from the discussion of industrial rehabilitation to a discussion of the rising tide of crime which has been sweeping the United States in recent years, but the philosophy which is

back of the development of industrial rehabilitation is the same philosophy which in the end, through its conservation of man power, will do more to mitigate conditions causing crime waves and other similar social phenomena than any other single item. If the thousands of industrial workers who are yearly incapacitated in industry and who for the moment are not themselves financially able to provide the means which will permit their return to industry, are carefully rehabilitated rather than allowed to drift, it is very probable that inroads will be made into conditions which breed crime and other social maladjustments to an extent which can hardly be imagined. To remake a wage earner in place of a charge upon the community, may mean the remaking of an American home and the reestablishment of proper home conditions. This will totally change the outlook on life and the probabilities of the development of the next generation in that family. Rehabilitation assists a human being who is a member of our industrial society to know that the community feels its responsibilities to him. It tells him, his family, and acquaintances that our industrial society is interested in his wellbeing as a producing member of that society. It will, therefore, tend to make him a stancher advocate of that industrial society. This Nation will be stronger, economically and spiritually, if each member of its industrial fabric is brought to realize his or her responsibilities in connection with the economic and social progress of the country.

To develop such a concept on the part of our individual workers, it is necessary for industry to develop a concept of its own responsibility to the workers, who, through no fault of his own, has been rendered incapacitated or his earning power reduced.

As machines increase, as industry becomes more complex, there will be a tendency toward increase in industrial accidents which the safety movement and all steps in accident prevention can at best only expect to aid in avoiding. Every possible safety precaution will be necessary to hold our own in the number of disabling industrial accidents. We must remember together with this situation the condition which we have seen now exists whereby we can not, either through choice or desire, throw aside the old industrial worker for the new. It must necessarily follow that accident prevention and rehabilitation work, the surface of which has as yet only been scratched, will necessarily become the conservation forces which will protect our man power. In those cases where accident prevention has failed, and they do and will reach into the hundreds of thousands annually, rehabilitation work becomes the sole conservation force.

I feel that we have only begun to think rehabilitation, that our efforts, although they are important steps in laying groundwork for the years to come, will soon be considered by ourselves as only having