The employment agency stands in the same relationship to the rule governed office as
the financial support for the unemployed stands to the wage. It is usually more
unfavourably located than the normal places of work; one notices that it is conceded to
those who have been compulsorily liberated from society. Its accommodation in its own
building, that might previously have been a school, already aspires to be little short of an
exception. The director of a recently created agency for motor drivers, pilots, etc.
informed me regretfully that his agency was so poorly located—in the interests of the
employment agency. For the employers did not like to communicate in a district in which
they would be afraid of leaving their often expensive vehicles unattended on the street. In
actual fact, the surrounding area is peopled by Zille figures and is not the appropriate
stopping place for fine car upholstery. Other employment agencies are located in the rear
sections of large building complexes. One of them, in which positions for metal workers
are dealt with, has just now been granted a place in the darkest regions. In order to make
one’s way to it, one must traverse two courtyards back from the street that are wedged in
by morose brick walls. The pressure which the masses of stone exercise is raised by the
fact that within them nonetheless work is still done. Finally, one detects no traces any
more of the street. The employment agency itself is to be found three flights of stairs up
at the furthest end of this world of nooks and crannies, and resembles an inverted fool’s
paradise in so far as on the way to it one has to first work one’s way through the endless
zone of smells of a public eating house. The fact that it makes the impression of a
warehouse, contrary to the rear front, is totally justified. Likewise, the unemployed wait
patiently in the rear front of the contemporary production process. They are secreted from
it as waste products, they are the left-overs that remain. Under the prevailing
circumstances, the space accorded to them can hardly have any other appearance than
that of a junk room.
From the windows of the metal workers’ employment agency one looks out at the
industrial life that is played out in the front part of the buildings. The buildings, filled by
the production and distribution process, mask the whole horizon of those who are
unemployed. The unemployed person has no sun of his own, he has always only the
employer in front of him who, at most, does not stand in his light if he offers work. ‘We
are primarily an organization for employers’, a section manager explained to me. The fact
that the rear part of the building of the employment agency exists in the shadow of the
front building occupied by the employer is made pronounced in the arrangements. At
specific hours, the particular relevant occupations are arranged: turner, pipelayer,
readymade clothing tailor, etc. An official mounts a small raised podium in the middle of
the hall and calls out the descriptions of the positions vacant. As a rule, dense crowds,
who are waiting for work, surround him. Their attention is riveted to the announcements
that drip down upon them from the heights of the realm of work, an ever-recurrent image
that graphically confirms the total dependency of the unemployed upon the powers in the
front part of the building. If these powers visit the employment agency then a special
room for employers is made available to them, in which they can negotiate with the
labour force. In the light of the present day state of the labour market, very few can hope
for an immediate transaction. As I learned in the agency for the textile trade, ‘out of
2,000 applications at the present time only around 10 are successful’. Here and there in
various places, I am given equally cheerless figures that are pointless to repeat here since,
without exception, they are to be found in the statistics. More fundamental and more
Rethinking Architecture 58