THE NEW UNIONISM.

Evening Star, Issue 11680, 12 February 1902, Page 3

THE NEW UNIONISM.

[No. 9.] THE FURNITURE TRADE. WONDERFUL~MACHINES. WHY FURNITURE IS SO CHEAP. GERMANY* AGAIN. The very considerable expansions which have been brought about in the English furniture trades during the past few years may be specially commended to the consideration of those workmen who are disposed to regard labor-saving machinery as necessarily inimical to their own interests. In the first instance, most of the machinery used here for cabinetmaking came from the United States; but of late years the British engineers have taken up the matter with an enterprise and an inventive skill that have enabled them to turn out machines equal to the best of those from America or Germany. But,, whatever may be the particular country in which the machines are constructed, the broad fact remains that two-thirds of the furniture now made in Great Britain is made by machinery. Not only do the machines produce sections or parts of furniture by the hundred or the thousand in » marvellously short space of time; there is the further consideration that the ma ehines do work of a kind that seems almost incredible. There is, for instance, an auto matic carving machine which is a perfect marvel of ingenuity. A workman puts a piece of timber into the machine, which he locks up, sets going, and then leaves to itself. Half an hour later he returns, finds that the maehine has stopped of its own accord, reopens it, and takes out the piece of timber, converted into an elaborately carved panel. This, when it has been finished off, could not b» distinguished from a similar panel which an ordinary wood-<arver might take a week to produce by hand. There is another machine which, worked br a lwv, will carve four panels at a the cutting tools being guided bv a metal pattern, and each acting siniullaueously on a piece of timber placed on u. separate shelf in the machine. Thanks io such devices as these, cheap bedroom suites, tor instance, can now be provided with an ;«nount <>f ornamentation which would otherwise be impossible at die price. Ju the same wav, the effect of the use ot madiinerv Iwis been both to cheapen ■■reatly the "cost of prmlnction and greatly to increase the demand for furniture at- (he substantially _lower prices for which it can now be obtained. So it is that the small makers, turning oat a few articles per week in iheir own hemes, with the help of their wives and children, have given place to large factories, where goods are produced m great quantities bv means of every mechanical device that- "human ingenuity has vet invented for the making o! furniture. Ix>nfion. too, can no longer be regarded as the seat of the industry, for the great factories which have sprung up iu Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and elsewhere have rendered each of those towns a furni-ture-making centre for its immediate district Then, too—and this is the point on which special stress may be laid—instead of the demand for labor having suffered a* the result of this extensive resort to labor-saving machines, the expansion of th? industry is such that the workers arc now 25 per cent, more in number tnan they were before the machinery era set in. It i* trae that this era has led to the introduction of a considerable element of foreign workers; but, in the opinion of one very competent authority on the subject, tlie're was plentv of work for the British and the foreigner* alike until the war in South Africa closed, for a tune, one of the very best markets of the English furniture cvportcr—that of the Cape. THE GOLD-BEATERS. -A CHANCE FOR THE PUBLIC. The incursions which German competition has made into the British gold-beating industry have played serious havoc with one of the oldest and most interesting of )Kir handicrafts. The demand for those wonderful "leaves" of £atm gold, which are so thin, that from 280 000 to 000,000 of them would be required to make the thickness of an inch, has greatly increased of late years in respect to their use for decorative gilding, picture signs, facias, the ornamentation of furniture, toe fettering on books, and so on; yet not only bag the" greater part of to* increased trade fallen into the hands of bnt they have managed to capture also the prater part of the trade formerly done by the English makers. In this instance, however, there Mm question of trade union reaction or mterfeence. The fault, if any, must be laid at the door of the British public rather than »t that of the operatives. It is true that the men, following the example of those encaged in so many other trades, do not worK m hard as they or their predecessors used to da It is said of them by those of long experience in the gold-beating trade that fhTspread in the workshops of what may be called the conversation habit has led to a decreased speed in working as compared vith that which was in vogue thirty years ago, so that a man who still work.* with old-faahioned energy ia rare. The output of the average individual worker to-day is add to be about 25 per cent less than it vas three decades ago; but as the men ■work piece the loss is on their side, and not tax that of the employer. The decreased energy is the more striking because there baa been a falling-off in the rate of wages, and one might suppose that the men would be likely to work even harder in order to make up the difference. Still, in the goldbeating trade there is no suggestion whatever that the lessened prosperity is due to the workpeople. For the chief causes of the decline one must look rather to the conditions under which the trade is carried on in Germany. Most of the competition experienced by fee English producers of gold-leaf conies from a type of German maker not to be found hi this country. In the districts where the handicraft is chiefly carried on in Germany men who are themselves little superior to the ordinary workmen are financed bv so-called "bankers" (belonging to the class known here as money-lenders) and start in tho gold-beating industry on their own account. Such individual!' will take into their service from twenty to thirty persons, and carry on what an Englishman would consider a lairly extensive business; but they will be content with a financial return that no employer of labor in this country would regard as adequate. Thus it may happen that a manufacturer of this class, employing thirty hands, will consider himself passing rich on an income of £3 a week, and will be quite content to live in a house only a little better than that of an ordinary skilled workman. There are, it is true, other manufacturers hi Germany with much larger concerns, and making much larger profits; bnt it is these smaller masters who supply most of the gold-leaf that competes with the Englkhmade article. Then there is the fact that the German makers use much more alloy with their gold than is th.- case with makers here, while they also adopt methods which (combined with the greater comparative speed at which their workpeople labor) enable them to produce more leaf in a given time, and at a less cost, though at the sacrifice of quality. Thus the German maker will offer for 35s what the English maker wants 45s for; but the difference in quality is such that the German gold-leaf, though suitable enough for the lettering on books, and other such purposes, is declared to be quite unsuitable for use in large surfaces, - or where it will be exposed to the weather. In these latter conditions the cheaper German article wiD want renewing in a year or so. whereas it is claimed for the English article that it will keep good for many years. It is just this difference in quality that has enabled the English manufacturers to make any stand at all against the German competition, and save the English trade from being swept away altogether. The English makers feel, however, that their fellowcountrymen do not appreciate the fact that in paying, say, £1 extra for English goldleaf on a £2O signboard, they will not only help to maintain a British industry now steadily declining, but will also gain a substantial advantage for themselves, because

they will not require to have their signboards regilded (and consequently repainted as veil) at the end of a year or so, as may happen when the cheaper but lees durable Qerman gold-leaf is employed. To the tradesman who supplies the signboard it iray be a distinct adavntage to use the foreign metal, not only because it costs him less to begin with, but also became he wdl be all the sooner called in to go over the work again. The remedy, therefore, lies in the hands of the British public; anil, as the British public has been actively employed of late in finding fault with the trade unionists for what they have done to tha detriment of British industries, it may be thought only fair to give to the trade uniomVts—just for once—the opportunity of Answering back. (To be continued.)