Employment Restrictions Quotes
Captain W.W. Polk, commanding the Coast Guard revenue cutter Florida, wrote Treasury Secretary asking permission to employ a young Negro on board. Existing regulations prohibited such. The Negro in question was a free Black born in New York who was an “expert sailor for his age and competent to the duty of a boy of the first class.” Polk had hired the boy as a servant after he had worked at sea for another Captain. Good seamen were hard to come by, decision was extremely contentious. Ingham “compromised” by limiting the allowable role of Negroes at sea—a practice that lasted till the Second World War.
The Nazis were by no means the only government to redefine "unemployment" to disguise the real extent of employment, but they took it to a new extreme. Even in America workers who had been looking for a job but were in an area where there were almost no jobs available were counted as unemployed in the 1960s. However when the Republicans came to power, they changed the definition so that if the worker was not actively going out and interviewing for a job he was no longer counted as unemployed regardless of how few jobs were available in his area. This reduced the unemployment rate significantly although nothing had really changed.
