"Wohin weiter"

The new industrial revolution and wages

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 897667751

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-15473

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Angerman, Claudius http://d-nb.info/gnd/139656359

Title:: "Wohin weiter"

Place of publication:: Wien

Publisher:: Im Selbstverlage des Verfassers

Year of publication:: 1914

Scope:: 1 Online-Ressource (35 Seiten)

Digitisation:: 2017

Collection:: Economics Books

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

Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: II. Umsichgreifendes Elend und Unzufriedenheit

Collection:: Economics Books

220 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES illustrating the striking change in the attitude of industry toward the wage-earner and the consumer, if indeed, the two may be differentiated :* In European industry, labor is a commodity, governed in price by a law of supply and demand. The industrialist pre- fers an overstocked labor market and speaks complacently of a labor reserve, meaning by that a supply in excess of the demand, so that labor will be docile and wages will stay down. Simply, he is a buyer of labor, and his first rule of profit is to cheapen what he buys. That language was once current in this country. The low- wage fallacy went with the pattern of industrialism as we received it from the Old World. It was not so long ago that American industry solidly opposed any law to restrict immi- gration, saying it could not do without cheap European labor to perform the manual task. It was so cheap that industry could afford to waste it, and did waste it in a callous manner. But the view has profoundly changed. . . . In the automobile industry, it had been demonstrated that by method, power and automatons the productive power of a man could be increased in a prodigious manner, with a re- sult divisible in three directions. The wage-earner got more wages, the public got cheaper motor cars and the profits were fabulous. The automobile industry offered only the most striking example. The same principle was working in many other places. Wages rising, costs falling, profits increasing. What the war did was to cause a wholesale reformation of industrial practise, under a new type of mentality, thus bring- ing to pass all at once a change that had been bound in any case to take place in a few years under stress of competi- tion. . . . There was for a long time no way of regarding wages but as the price of labor. To think of wages as payment for work performed, roughly measured by the quantity of output 1 “The American Book of Wonder,” by Garet Garrett; The Saturdey Eve- ning Post, Philadelphia, January 7, 1928. See also “The American Omen,” by Garet Garett. E. P. Dutton and Co., New York. 1928.

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