As long as the regime was still consolidating power, labor policies largely were concerned with the challenge of conquering mass unemployment. To this end, the new power holders utilized a variety of strategies, including increasing coercion in the labor market. During the first two years of Nazi rule, unemployment fell by more than half, from 35 percent in January 1933 to 17 percent two winters later, and 13 percent in the summer and fall of 1935.30 Still, the recovery remained fragile and uneven: even as the overall level of joblessness fell, alarming pockets of high unemployment remained in the large cities.31 To improve the balance in the recovery, but also—so it was claimed—to serve the regime's longer-term goal of restoring a balance between the nation's industrial and agricultural sectors,32 measures in 1934 and 1935 gave the Reichsanstalt new powers to control the allocation of labor. Two laws allowed the Labor Administration to prevent companies from hiring workers in high-unemployment areas if the workers recently had moved there or if they recently had been employed in agriculture, as well as from hiring young workers (under twenty-fi ve) at the expense of older ones. In 1935, a monopoly law finally brought the remaining independent job placement offi ces, which had been tolerated by the 1922 Labor Exchange Law and 1927 Reichsanstalt legislation, under the control of the Labor Administration.33 While these measures were limited in important ways—applying only to selected cities, exerting largely indirect pressure on employers, or sanctioning a de facto monopoly that had long existed—the extension of the Reichsanstalt's explicit powers still gave a preview of the more sweeping changes that would occur after 1935, in particular, in 1938.