International trade

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1758394757

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136209

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Taussig, Frank William http://d-nb.info/gnd/120199459

Title:: International trade

Place of publication:: New York, NY

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: XXI, 425 Seiten; graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part II. Problems of verification

Collection:: Economics Books

184 INTERNATIONAL TRADE first operation, painstaking manual labor is called for. When the young shoots come up, they need first to be blocked, then thinned. “Blocking” means that most of the beets in the rows are cut out by a hoe, small bunches only being left, about ten inches apart. These bunches are then “thinned”; every plant is pulled out by hand except one, the largest and healthiest. Essentially the same situation appears when harvesting is reached. The beets may be first loosened by a plow and by a lifter ; but each individual beet must be pulled out by hand. Finally, they are “topped”; that is, the neck and leaves are cut off by hand with a large knife. In sum, the growing of the sugar-beet calls for a large amount of monotonous unskilled labor. Not only does the typical Amer- ican farm and farm community lack the numbers of laborers required ; the labor itself is of a kind distasteful to the American farmers. The way in which this need of dull labor has been met is instructive not only as regards the beet sugar industry itself, but also as regards a general trend in the United States during the generation preceding the Great War. Almost everywhere in the beet sugar districts we find laborers who are employed or con- tracted for in gangs, an inferior class which is utilized, perhaps exploited, by a superior. In Colorado “immigrants from Old Mexico compete with New Mexicans (z.e. born in New Mexico), Russians, and Japanese.” In Michigan, the main labor supply comes from the Polish and Bohemian population of Cleveland, Buffalo, and other large cities. As was said in a circular issued by the Department of Agriculture, “living in cities there is a class of foreigners — Germans, French, Russians, Hollanders, Austrians, Bohemians — who have had more or less experience in beet grow- ing in their native countries . . . every spring sees large colonies of this class of workmen moving out from our cities into the beet fields.” In the general economic organization of the great central region, labor conditions of this sort play no appreciable part. Here the one-family farm dominates; there is nothing in the nature of an agricultural proletariat. And here there is no sugar-beet industry of any moment. It pays better to raise corn; there is a clear

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