The City's Short-Sighted Employment Plan
Everett's leaders wanted to combine the city's employment office with the mundane task of weighing store scales, a move that critics argued would doom the city's ability to help working people find jobs.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
An ordinance made its appearance in the city council meeting Monday night providing for the combination of the duties of employment agent and inspector of weights and measures. The inspector shall have charge of the free employment bureau but shall only be required to be on duty in that position from 8 to 10 a.m. and from 10 to 6 p.m. This would not be fair to the employment bureau. The Everett office, before the financial cyclone struck our administration, had gotten a good set of patrons. Agent Norland gave his time to the work and gradually built up a business on a solid basis. Your proposed ordinance is a step backward. You cannot expect much of the employment office if the agent must look for his pay to other work. The weights and measures will engross his attention and time that should be given to the employment office. Bear in mind that when an employer wants men, he wants them bad, and when a man wants work, he wants it bad. How long will the office hold that employer's business if the agent is off attending to scale inspections? Don't make a farce out of the employment office.
“Don't advertise to the world that we can buy automobile fire apparatus but can't scrape up $75 a month to pay the employment agent's salary.”
This 1912 critique of bureaucratic cost-cutting measures that cripple public services echoes contemporary debates in Everett regarding how the city prioritizes public infrastructure versus administrative convenience. The tension between treating the employment bureau as a vital lifeline versus a side-hustle for inspectors remains a perennial struggle in local municipal governance.
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