THE MENACE OF THE MACHINE

Hokitika Guardian, 7 April 1931, Page 7

THE MENACE OF THE MACHINE

(Exchange). The new President of Brazil has evidently decided to make a bold stand against unemployment and industrial depression by declaring war on laboursaving machinery. lie lias issued a decree prohibiting for three years the importation of machinery for manufacturing purposes. But we must realise that the belief that “bad times'’ are characteristic phenomena of a

“machine” age is by no means confined to Brazil. In the Mouse of t vaiiDKiiis recently, Miss Bondfield, who is practically the Minister in charge of industrial affairs, discussing the Unemployment Insurance I'und and the necessity for further borrowing, laid great stress upon labour-sav-ing machinery as one of thefundamental causes of the existing lack ot employment in Great Britain and elsewhere. She illustrated her argument by reference to the cigarettemaking industry, m winch, a in i nine operated by three workers can do the work of 700 hands, and she instanced also the calculating and clerical machines installed in banks, which enable 8(5 women to supersede 311 male clerks. It is evident that ein Britain and especially ill the ranks of Labour the conviction is already widespread that labour-saving devices are largely answerable ifor the increase of unemployment throughout the world. It is not to be imagined that the displacement of skilled labour by machinery is a novel event in the history of modern industry. On the contrary, during the early stages or trie Industrial Revolution which made Britain tlm greatest manufacturing country in the world, men and women who had spent their lives in acquiring a high degree of mechanical or technical skill in the manual processes of production, were shut out ol work l>v hundreds of thousands and suiTered most acutely from enforced idleness But in those days, with the rapid fall in the cost of production and tlie consequent cheapening of manufactured goods ,tho market for British exports was constantly expanding in all countries, and the displaced labour was as a rule speedily absorbed again, either in old or new industries. But the present state of things is wholly different from the conditions produced by the Industrial Revolution, because the world’s markets are no longer expanding more rapidly than the output of goods and the comparative lack of purchasing power, due to a great variety of causes, has left the markets saturated with goods and so barred the avenues to employment, All these considerations raise 'quest” ions of vast importance to the workers; indeed they involve the material welfare of the whole world. “Has the machine in its last furious manifestation of mass production begun to eliminate workers faster than new tasks can be found for them, however, long can they wait?” This is the question put by btuart Chase in his remarkable work, “Men and Machines,” and bis book supplies an answer that hardly justifies an optimistic view of the present industrial situation. “Here is an electric bandsaw bv which i

one man can take the place of four; a power-chisel which does tire work of ten; a floor-sanding machine which puts five mm on the sfrect fei v»very device installed.” To-day two men can tend a steel-furnace which once required the care of fourteen men; seven men cast as much pig-iron as sixty could cast half a century ago; on steamers three firemen presiding over gauges replace 120 stokers. In Austria, where “speeding up” was urgently needed to restore th G country after the war, 12.000 labour-saving machines introduced into the country in one year took away work from nearly 130,000 men In America, Mr Ford when lie adopted his new model for ears, put off 00,000 men for an indefinite time to come. And so on throughout the country, Does all this mean that as Mr Ethelbert Stewart puts it, the world is starting on an era of more or less permanent unemployment produced by labour-saving machines? For if, to quote Mr Chase again, “the hotter able we are to produce the worse off we shafT be,” then tlie attitude eff flip whole world toward labour-saving machinery needs prompt and radical readjustment,