AMERICAN LABOUR.

Thames Star, Volume LXII, Issue 17371, 22 May 1928, Page 6

AMERICAN LABOUR.

GIIO WING UNEAIPLOYMENT

MEN OUSTED BY MACHINES

LONDON, April 30. The growth of unemployment m the United States is now being attributed to the increased perfection of mechanical process and this, says the Times in a remarkable dispatch from Washington, is described as constituting as grave a problem as any confronting the country. With five per cent, fewer employees last year American factories turned out seven per cent, more products than the previous year, and nobody seems to know where this increase of “technological” unemployment may end.

The machine seems to run dangerously ahead of man, with the result that, as one writer says: “We are obtaining more and better industrial equipment only at the price of heavy investment in unemployment and human misery.” Another writer points out: “The restriction on immigration, instead of strengthening our always weak craft unionism, has destroyed it. Mechanisation has hastened and enforced the tendency and the balance of power has passed to the iron man. Though operations become more specialised, skill becomes less so; and in large stretches

of industry labour has become merely automatic machine tending.” In short, remarks the Times correspondent. American labour to-day is to a degree little realised unskilled labour. The standardisation imposed on the product has been stamped on the man.