A Word in Season.

Manawatu Herald, 29 March 1902, Page 2

A Word in Season.

The South Wales Misers’ Federation held their annual conference at Cardiff at the beginning of February, and Mr Abraham, M.P. (Mabon), the president, in his opening address gave them some advice which might be followed with great advantage to themselves, not only by the miners, but by every other body of workers in the country. He said he had just returned from America, and what he had seen there led him to advise the workers of Great Britain to withdraw their opposition to the introduction of machinery. Me said what he had seen was that the worker became the director of the machine instead ot being a machine himself. He had seen rolling mills turn out 1.300 tons of finished steel in 24honrs, and no more than twelve men to l.e seen about the place. Everything was done by machinery, and the men instead of doing hard work, directed the machines. And it is to be hoped the miners will bear this in mind when the masters want to introduce the American electric coal-cutting machines into the British pits. I notice that an electric engineer over there has invented a machine specially for the British mar ket, and the first delivery was to be made this week. I have not seen one yet, but there is a great deal of talk about them down here, and the account you read about them in the papers is almost like a fairy tale. As everyone knows who has been down a pit, the first work of the miner is to cut under the coal so that it can be blown down. This is very hard, dangerous, and wasteful work; wasteful because all the coal he cuts out is slack. The new machine is supposed to undercut to a depth of six feet, a space four inches high and three feet nine inches wide without any waste at all; it does in five minutes more work than a miner would do in an hour; it cuts 242 square feet in an hour, doing the work of fifteen men.