HAND LABOUR.

Northern Advocate, 28 June 1924, Page 9 (Supplement)

HAND LABOUR.

PERSISTS WITH BEIdKS.

This i.s an age of mechanical industry, but in some classes of production hand labour is .still able to compete to a remarkable extent with machinery. Theie are, for instance, tvo methods of making bricks. One is to mix and mould the clay by hand and to bum the cricks in the open air in stacks, ani the other is to carry out the whole process by means of expensive machinery and to burn the bricks in huge permanent kilns. The former process, which is the method by which our forefathers used to obtain their bricks, does not reqivire a very great amount of capital while the latter 7s necessarily the undertaking of capitalists. It is a somewliac surprising fact that a material proj/jition of the bricks use-1 in London are made on the Kent brickfields by ihe older method. A prominent Lancashire buildei declared recently that the resultant competition kept the brick trade in al>ealthy condition, and ensured a better control over prices than there was in Manchester find other where all ihe bricks v.sed were machine-made. The briels, this authority observed, might be better and more even, but the handmade bricks were often used for the insice work, wheTe their comparative unevenness did not show.