FREED BY MACHINES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIV, Issue 1186, 8 December 1924, Page 11

FREED BY MACHINES.

EMANCIPATED WORKERS. Alodorn machinery has emancipated the worker, says William Bassett, in the Forum. He says: “1 see in a boiler shop not a hell of noise and hot metal, in which toil the slaves of machines, but rather the means of freeing thousands of women from the reul slavery of carrying coal up countloss flights of steps to tens of thousands of stovos. I seo in the noisy but light and casy-to-hundle riveting hammer a machine which saves a dozen men the back-break-ing work of swinging heavy sledges. 1 see one man do,more work with it in eight hours than the dozen would have done in a twelve-hour day. I know that while the dozen would have fallen in.bed within an hour after the whistle blew, worn out with their efforts, the ‘slave’ of the riveter is fit and ready for half a dozen hours of play. And this slave of a machine bus more money to spend and more comforts cm which to spend it than had the freeman of the band hammers. That one picture portrays most of the ways in which machines have set men free from slavish drudgery and have given them command over goods that a king could not Have owned in days of handwork and eraftmanship.”