People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 September 1895 — MACHINERY VS. LABOR [ARTICLE]

MACHINERY VS. LABOR

CO-OPERATION MUST COME IN THE NEAR future. The Propreiw of the Haman Race IXemanav That It Shall —Some Facta Gleaned from the New York Labor Report. In his summary of the twelfth annual report of the bureau of statistics of labor of the state of New York the commissioner' states “the decrease o? the working force by the use of machinery” as follows: Carpenters. 15 per cent; clothing, buttonhole workers, 50 per cent; shirtmakers, 30 per cent; suspender-mak-ers, 33 1-3 per cent: food products, bakers and confectioners, 20 per cent; furniture workers. 35 per cent; hatmakers, 50 per cent: matmakers, 60 per cent; boiler-makers and iron shipbuilders, 43 1-3 per cent: horseshoers, 33 1-3 per cent; boot, shoe and slipper makers, 37 per cent: sail makers. 30 per cent; seamen, 50 per cent; bookbinders, 31% per cent; printers (compositors), 41 1-3 per cent; type founders, 50 per cent; brown stone cutters, 50 per cent; silk ribbon weavers, 40 per cent: coopers, 62% per cent; wood carvers. 20 per cent. And what becomes of the men who are knocked out of a job? Do they stop eating when forced to quit work? Does the landlord stop the rent? Do their children no longer need clothes? Do they become gentlemen of leisure, spending the summer at Newport, and the winter in Italy? Has this glorious machinery relieved the workers of the necessity of earning a living? Has it provided them a better opportunity to employ their faculties? Does it free them from poverty? Do their wages go on as before? Do the ones who operate the machines get wages commensurate with their greatly increased capacity of production?

Have the hours of labor been reduced, so that all may enjoy leisure and all may earn a living by 50 per cent less toil? Have the idle poor been placed on a parity with the idle rich? Is the machinery feeding the men whom it has crowded out? Have the idle poor been placed on a millionairenium ? “Labor-saving”—for whom? It saves for the absorbers the expense of hiring men at living wages, and dispenses with the services of the only kind of men on earth who have earned a right to a share of the earth’s products. It makes slaves, beggars and thieves of men who are honest, able and willing to work. It stuffs useless paunches and starves useful brain and muscle. It builds palaces for lazy hogs, and drives industrious, intelligent citizens out to sleep on the highways. It drives womanhood to prostitution, and manhood to hell. It cultivates fashionable hotbeds, and sends virtue to the ice-house of charity to freeze to death. All because the machinery is owned and monopolized by a gang of speculators whose only object is to make money, and who don’t care if everybody else on earth is crushed so they get their interest and dividends. The machinery is a good thing, if it were used for the benefit of the people, instead of being used by a few to enable them to dispense with the balance. When these men are crowded out and dare ask for their rights as men, the fellows who own the machinery also own the government, and order out troops to shoot them down. Thus does “labor-saving” machinery save labor —by dispensing with the laborer and substituting the machine. Men have rights greater than money, property, or machinery. And if a time should ever come when machinery can do all the work, then every man would have a right to live without work. But that time will never come, and no man has a right to live without labor, whether he owns machinery or owns nothing. The progress of the race demands cooperation, and unless the demand is heeded civilization will fall weltering In its own blood.