Unemployment in the United States

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1828236179

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-226169

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Unemployment in the United States

Place of publication:: Washington

Publisher:: United States, Government Printing Office

Year of publication:: 1930

Scope:: II, 193 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Statement of Mr. William Green, president of American Federation of Labor

Collection:: Economics Books

52 UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES In order that this service may have the confidence of industry and labor, there should be understanding and approval of policies and decisions by those directly concerned. This sort of confidence can come only from participation in policy making. There should be, therefore, an advisory council in which labor and industry should have representation. . In addition to workers looking for new jobs there are workers with social handicaps, such as the older worker and workers displaced by technological changes. We hear of many industries that refuse employment to workers past certain age limits and the plight of many of these persons who must work to live is truly pitiable. As a nation we should make some effort to help these workers to find a way to self-support, for middle-aged workers denied employment merely because of age, augment the ranks of the unemployed. . There should be job analysis to establish job requirements and to find types of work for which older members are suited. Experience and responsibility are of special value in some kinds of work. TECHNOLOGICAL UNEMPLOYMENT Technological unemployment is no new thing but the rate at which it has been developing in the past 10 years makes it a special problem. A wage earner must have a job in order to meet his living expenses. As his reserve margins are small, loss of his job is the shadow of the great fear that is the background of labor thinking. It is bad to lose a job but it is a catastrophe to lose one’s trade skill. When craft skill is “transferred to a machine’ the craftsman is industrially bankrupt. Craft skill that was an investment of a lifetime of work goes to the industrial scrap heap when scientists find new proc- esses or inventors produce new machines. Their trades are gone and because workers must live, they seek jobs in other callings—often at lower incomes and with consequent lower standards of living. On the other hand technical progress means more things at lower prices and consequently more physical comforts and greater ease of living for greater num- bers of people. Technical progress is the means to higher material civilization. Progress comes from change. Change means dislocation. It is a sad commen- tary that individual wage earners have paid the social costs of technological progress in industry. What thought has been given to musicians displaced by music reproductions, to the art of the actor forgotten in the latest movietone? To the Morse operator displaced by the teletype, to the steel worker displaced by a new process, to the carpenter watching a house assembled by units, to the printer turned out by the teletypesetter? Such workers in thousands have been turned out without jobs, and without the possibility of future employment in the craft in which they have invested their all. Here are a few of the changes which have made jobs scarce: Take for instance the manufacture of electric-light bulbs. In 1918 it took one man a whole day to make 40 electric light bulbs. The next year came a machine that made 73,000 bulbs in 24 hours.) Each of these machines threw 992 men out of work. In the boot and shoe industry, 100 machines take the place of 25,000 men. In the manufacture of razor blades, one man can now turn out 32,000 blades in the same time needed for 500 in 1913. In automobile factories similar changes have taken place. In a Middle Western State to-day, a huge machine turns out completed automobile frames almost untouched by human hand. About 200 men are needed to supervise this vast machine, and they turn out between 7,000 and 9,000 frames a day. Compare this with a well-known automobile plant in Central Europe where the same number of men are making automobile frames by older methods. They turn out 35 frames a day. In steel blast furances 7 men now do the work of 80 in casting pig iron, and even in the last two years, since 1927, the improvements in technical processes have reduced the necessary work force in the Bessemer proc- ess by 24 per cent. In machine shops, one man with a “gang” of semiautomatic machines replaces 25 skilled mechanics. Thirty workers with ten machines can now do the work of 240 in the Sun Tube Corporation machine shop. A new machine installed by the DeForrest Radio Co. will turn out 2,000 tubes an hour with 3 operatives as against 150 tubes from the old machine with 40 operators. What happens to these displaced workers? Take the record for all manufac- turing industry in the United States. In the decade from 1899 to 1909, production increased 59 per cent. Improved machinery played some part in this incresse, but it was largely made possible by taking on more wage earners, for the number ?P Marazine of Wall Street.

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