14 BULLETIN 1211, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTUR:2. 
men, and when the harvesters do finally arrive they are likely to 
arrive in excessive numbers. Farmers are bound to lose more grain 
by shattering when the men travel by freight than when they travel 
by passenger trains. Harvest hands are certain to encounter local 
labor surpluses more frequently, and be unable to get work when 
traveling by freight. They must also lose many more days’ time 
during the harvest when riding freights, because of the extra time 
required to shift from one area to another. 
The employment office and agricultural officials, moreover, find 
their efforts to control the flow of harvest labor much less difficult 
when the laborers travel on passenger trains, as in Canada. The 
railroads are able to furnish the employment service, as needed, with 
daily figures showing the number of men who have gone to each 
locality. If their work is properly organized, the employment 
officials can largely control the flow of the labor which does not come 
to the employment offices as well as of that which does. But when 
the workers are riding the freights it is not possible to keep any ac- 
curate account of the volume of the movement along each railroad 
and its branches.* The United States Employment Service sends 
“scouts” to watch the movement of men by freight trains and esti- 
mate its volume, but is unable to do more than roughly guess at the 
flow of labor along the different railroad routes. 
METHODS OF OBTAINING EMPLOYMENT. 
Harvest hands use a variety of means to obtain work when they 
arrive in the harvest area. (See Table 8.) Two-thirds of those inter- 
viewed depended principally upon picking up jobs by interviews 
with farmers met on the streets of labor-distribution centers like 
Enid, Wichita, Hutchinson, Sioux City, Aberdeen, Fargo, and 
Grand Forks, or ‘wheat towns” like Larned and Great Bend, Kans., 
or Oakes, Hillsboro, or New Rockford, N. Dak. (See figs. 8 and 9.) 
Obviously, much of the service of the employment offices furnishing 
harvest labor must consist in directing the flo of that labor which 
does not come to the offices to obtain work, but relies upon its own 
initiative. This labor must be guided in proper quantities into the 
several towns of the counties needing labor. 
It will be noted in the table that the use of private fee-charging 
employment agencies was important only among the men interviewed 
at Sioux City and in North Dakota. In these two areas a considerable 
number of men were interviewed who had used private agencies in 
Kansas City, Omaha, Sioux City, and Minneapolis. These were mostly 
migratory laborers, who worked at seasonal employment like railroad 
“extra gang’? work, road construction, lumbering, and harvest work, 
and were accustomed to the use of fee-charging agencies to find jobs. 
6 Detailed discussion of this problem, including a description of the Canadian system, appears in Bul- 
letin 1020, pp. 28-30. 
_ 
id 
ee eee ee ee eee en ee ea Se 
ee ee 
