DIFFERENCES IN LABOR COSTS 175 
geneity is by no means complete. Japanese yarn, for example, 
tho it be of the same count as the American, is inferior in quality. 
The inferiority, as it happens, is not a handicap to the Japanese 
yarn in China, the chief market to which it is exported; tho it 
would very much affect the sale if exports were made to the 
United States or to a European country. The same inferiority 
appears in the woven cloths. The differences in quality serve to 
render even more striking the comparisons which follow, since these 
make no allowance for the poorer quality of the Japanese product. 
The outstanding fact is that the output per laborer employed is 
four times as great in the United States as in Japan. The output 
of yarn (number 20, 7.e. medium yarns) per spinner is 104 pounds 
per day in Japan, 414 per day in the United States. The output 
per weaver is 145 yards daily in Japan; it is 450 yards per day 
in the United States on plain looms, 1100 yards on automatic 
looms. Plain looms in the United States are obsolescent for 
fabrics of the kind selected for this comparison. Only older mills 
still use them ; the automatic loom is the representative apparatus. 
Both for spinning and weaving, some qualification needs to be 
attached to the comparisons. The American spinner has the aid of 
a doffer boy or girl; the American weaver on automatic looms has 
the aid of a similar attendant who supplies fresh bobbins. But the 
inclusion of this additional American labor would affect the final 
figures but little. Nor would they be much affected by the 
inclusion of still another item ; namely, the higher capital cost of 
the automatic loom. I have already indicated in what way this 
circumstance should be taken into account ;! it can be of but slight 
effect on the total of labor involved per unit of output. 
The same contrast appears, and no less strikingly, when it is 
presented in the inverse way. We may ask what is the number of 
workmen employed per unit of machinery, thus envisaging not the 
number of units produced per workman but the number of workmen 
per unit of product. “A Japanese cotton mill requires approxi- 
mately four times as many employees for the same amount of 
machinery as does a similar American mill. . . . On a standard 
1 Chapter 7. pp. 68 ef seq.