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.
