Nelson Evening Mail. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29. AMERICAN ARTISANS AND THE LABOUR LIMIT.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue XXXVI, 29 September 1902, Page 2

Nelson Evening Mail. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29.

AMERICAN ARTISANS AND THE LABOUR LIMIT.

vidual output, as there is no other deduction to bo made from the present situation than that in this 1 individual competition between men making the same wage lies the greater part of the strength of American industry in the matter of cheap production. Profit - sharing and bonuses are so far merely incidental, and there is no wide-spread effort to iutroduce these ideas. There have been more failures than successes in the experiments made, and the influence of the systems is so small that it cannot be taken into account in treating of American labour and production.

ONE SECRET OF SUCCESS THE question why American industry and handicrafts .ire virtually capturing the tr?de of the world has often been discussed, and one of tbo reasons for the enormous strides made in manufacture during less than a ceDtury has been given as the system of profit sharing and bonuses. This idea, however, is erroneous, aud an investigation by Mr Carroll D. Wright, the Commissioner of Labour in the United States, has shown that neither profit-sharing nor bonuses aft'ect in any great measure productiveness or excellence of workmanship. The m thed is not employed except in isolat d inBtances, and in some of these even it has proved a failure. Moreover, profit-sharing and bonuses are distinct feystems. Profit-sharing is in reality more prevalent in Europe than in America, while the bonus is distinctively an American notion, not always adopted for worthy ends, notably in the drapery and kindred trades, where men receive commission fjr disposing of worn or damaged goeds to unsuspecting customer?. The bonus system, however, apparently in its most successful form, is largely used in American newspaper offices. In a composing or type-setting room, using 12 or 11 Mergosthaler machines (linotypes), where the weekly pay roll will amount to perhaps £100, it is the custom in some places to offer a weekly prize of £10, to bo a portioned among the three competitors who set the most type during the week, the swiftest man getting A's--and each of tho others £2 10s. Several of the Boston newspapers profess to have secure! profitable results by this system ; but in a number of other offices it has been tried and a 1 andoned, as it was found that tho four or five beft men in the office won the prize with great regularity, aud the other competitors, finding competition hopeless, relaxed to ordinary speed. These three men received very large wages, and did v^ry little mo than their ordinary skill and pride would have led them to accomplish without tho stimulus of a prize. One of the best newspaper offices in America has established what it calls " a dead line." An/ man falling below tho setting power of 37,000 cms a, day is discharged, but any man capa 1 le of holding his position is paid lGs a day for eight hours' work, or 2s more tbau the union s:ale. * • » Rejecting profit-shunug aud bonuses as the niiiin incentive to excellence of workmanship and fecundity of production, Mr Wright 1 comes to the real s 6ret, which is that there is no limit to the productiveness of an American workman by his associ itrs. Piecework is largely the rule, and the more a man can turn out tho better he is paid, not in the matter of quantity alone, but on a sliding scale increasing with the standard of output. The result is abundanctfof material made daily, and this,, together with tho readiness of manufacturers to adopt improvements, and to spend money - on the latest approved labour-saving i machinery, accounts to a consider- ' able extent for the great hold America 13 tab ing in the worlds trade, in machinery and tools and kindred manufactures especially. • • * But there are signs that this advantageous condition may not last. The great building trade and kindred callings strike at Chicago last year, which cost £5,000,000 in wages and lost the f.ity the construction of £ 1 0,000,000 worth of buildings, was over the contention that the Trade , Union had the right to limit the j extent of work which should be done by any one man in eight hours. The strike failed owing to the vast resources of the largest contractors but the union leaders still cling to the idea, which has been imported from Europe, that in time they will be able to say how much a man shall do in a day. The situation is so critical in this respect that capitalists who put tboir rnonev into great sky-scraping slructures will no longer build them .under the old rule of partial payments as the work progresses, The contractor must be able to say, "I will build your building for £500,0u0, and not ask a cent until I can hand the keys of the completed structure over to you, and I will give you b">nds for the faithful carrying cut of my contract." Not many contractors are able to do this, hence in the one city of Chicago hundreds of smaller concerns have been driven to the wall, and tho business throughout the country is now in the ha- da of a few wellknown firms, who have uulimited financial resources. Ihese firms-aro determined to prevent the control of labour by the Unions, and therefore, if a strike interfere? with their operations, they simply close up in the city affected and carry their work to other places. Sometimes these locks-out last for over a year, till labour surrenders • • • * Meantime, wages are high and work is plentiful in tho U.S., yet tb/ro arc intermittent) conflicts all over questions of right and priyi r lege3 and the limitation of the day's work, Mr Carroll D. Wright, in summing up, says it is believed by sonic of the mote conservative American labour leaders thai theiv fellow-workers are making a fatal error in attempting to restrict inch;.