LABOUR AND MACHINERY

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 263, 30 June 1932, Page 6

LABOUR AND MACHINERY

(To the Editor"). Sir, — Some weeks ago I wrote you on what you were pleased to call "first prineiples". Since then a lot of information has come my way. In America machinery has so deposed human labour that to-day around 40 : per cent. of the population are idle. For instance, cow-spanking is now done wholly by machinery and faster than ever — fifty cows are driven on to a revolving table, washed, milked, and turned out again to go on with their job of converting grass into milk — all in the space of twelve minutes. By means of this machme, five people can milk 250 cows in an hour, thus doing away with eight other pe.ople. Another machine which replaces men by mechanical apparatus is a cash register book lteeper and adding machine combined. One girl operates this combination and when your account is over'drawn it automatically locks itself and when released, shows a red light with the exact amount overdrawn. Here again 50 per cent of the human hands are dispensed with to go on the scrap heap with ex-eowspank-ers, miners, shearers, and harvesters. In Australia, a stripping machine strips the heads off the wheat, threshes and bags it, again doing the work that would have taken twenty hands thirty years ago, and so on ad infinitum. Forty per cent. of our workers are cast on to the scrap heap libe junks of iron. When the machine owners are asked for a job by any of these dispossessed hands, they are told to go to the devil. Well most of them go and become disgruntled agitators or rackateers — any old thing or name. But still human beings must be fed and clotlied. Without work there is no money to buy the necessaries of life. The profiteers are holding us up for more profit and all because the wealth creating machinery is being held by a few individuals. Sir, did John Watt or Stevenson, when they harnessed steam, imagine or realise what a man-destroying weapon they had forged? I don't think so. They, like all creators, looked at the benefit to man — a benefit to the then slaves of that day. To-day the wage slaves are being cast on to the scrap heap to rot, and all because of the greed of that allconsuming molock, profit and investment. But what of the morrow? — I am, etc., C. J. TUCK. Rotorua, June 29.