ABSTRACT
This chapter considers public works projects plus efforts to isolate and employ work-shy or jobless individuals in tramp prisons, labor colonies and work houses. The primary objective throughout all of these public efforts to cope with unemployment was to design measures which would prevent the formation of idle habits by keeping the workers occupied. During the 1870's labor houses were available to quarantine the contaminated idlers, cure them of sloth and rehabilitate them to join the work force. Looking at organizational aspects of the exchanges, contemporaries found that certain specialized employment agencies which catered to all members of a single trade posed administrative problems stemming in large part from job mobility. The administration of relief took on a certain added sophistication during the Nineties as the refuges began to make greater use of centralized organizational methods. A more palatable approach to unemployment seemed to lie in the introduction of insurance schemes which would give a worker greater security.
