Jasper County Democrat, Volume 15, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 September 1912 — HO AID TO WORKER [ARTICLE]

HO AID TO WORKER

TARIFF IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE PROSPERITY OF THE WAGE EARNER. PROVED BY TWO INSTANCES Condition of Workingmen In Highly Protected Steel Industry Is Bad While Plants of Moderately Protected Farm Implement Industry Are Bright Spots In Labor World. By agreement of all observers, a lie dies hard. There, for example, is the lie that asserts that the American workingman is dependent upon the tariff for whatever he enjoys of superiority to the ‘ pauper workman” of Europe In wages and standawTof living. Let us look at a couple American industries, one very highly, the other very moderately, protected. By the theory, the workingmen employed in the first ought to be better off than those employed in the second. 1 ake. the steel industry and the agricultural implement industry, both flourishing, and each enjoying a good export, trade. And in order not to complicate the tariff problem with tlie trust problem, suppose we leave out the harvesting end of the implement industry and consider only the manufacture of plows and machinery for planting and cultivating, an unmonopolized branch. The steelmaker is protected by a .45 per cent, tariff; the tariff on agricultural implements is just 15 per cent. For the past fifteen years—the period of most rapid development of both industries—the tariff on steel has ranged from two and one-quarter to three times as much as that on implements. The condition of the workingmen in the highly protected steel industry, generally speaking, is bad, as the world knows, A tariff barrier of 45 per. cent, against the output of the pauper labor” of Belgium, Germany and England has not kept the American workingman from making the acquaintance of the twelve !-hour day and the seven-day week. It is not necesary to resume familiar facts; the Pittsburg Survey will supply de tails to the curious, at any public library. Since the degree of prosperity assured to the workingman by a 45 per cent, tariff is s so low, we should be prepared, acordlng to orthodox Republican doctrine, to find the employes of plow, planter and cultivator factories the pariahs of the industrial world.

The very contrary of this assumption is the fact. There are no brighter spots in the American industrial system than these very plants, whose tariff protection is relatively so little, in the “plow’ towns” of Illinois you find wages good. Scrupulous attention is paid to matters of safety and factory sanitation. In no* industry employing an equal amount of unskilled labor are conditions more stable. From this, and the thriftiness of the w’orkingmen, it results that a large proportion of them own their own homes. It is not uncommon to find workingmen of three generations of the same family in a single organization. One large concern has a successful pension and Insurance scheme in operation; another. Instead of buying outright Inventions of employes, pays substantial royalties for the use of them.

The tariff was not designed to help the workingman. It Is a trick to enable the manufacturer to exploit the consumer. Nothing could be more conclusive on this point than the contrast between industrial conditions in the two industries under discussion. Why is the ‘‘infant” steel industry, protected by a 45 per cent, tariff and Belling annually about $280,000,000 worth of its products in the foreign market, unable to treat Its workingmen as well as the plow and planter Industry, which has only a 15 per cent, tariff and an export trade of about one-twenty-fifth as much? And how does it come that the implement maker some years since, professed their willingness to get on without any tariff at all while the steel industry, according to no less an authority than President Taft’s veto mesage, would be withered and blighted If the duties on steel were reduced to a figure still substantially higher than the implement duties? The answer is that the tariff philosophy is a farrago of lies.