MACHINES AND INDUSTRY.

Waikato Times, Volume 105, Issue 17751, 1 July 1929, Page 6

MACHINES AND INDUSTRY.

There is no more pressing problem facing industry and labour than that of fitting the modern machine into-the economic system. The necessary reallocation of labour which modern machine power invariably demands is a temporary problem, and because it is temporary the larger and more permanent advantages of the machine should not be obscured by too short a view, it is true that by the use of the machine one man supplants fortytwo at the open-hearth steel furnaces; one automatic bottle machine performs in one day the work which formerly required forty-one men; three men now do in three to seven hours tlie locomotive repair work that once occupied eight men for three weeks. A brick-making machine turns out 40,000 bricks a day, a task which once took nearly 400 men to complete; and so on down the long gamut of twentieth century mass production technique. But this is only one side of the story. As men are succeeded by machines in the making of goods, more men are required to stimulate consumption to absorb the increased output. Thus we find tt£at. the community as a whole is sharing in the blessings of increasing wealth. It must be so or. cheaper and increased production would be a mockery. There is no profit in making automobiles at GO per cent, reduction in labour cost if there is no market for the cheaper machines, because there ore no jobs for. the people who must buy the machines if they are sold. The capital that is released by the machine at the same time that it releases a manual worker turns to new employment for itself and makes new employment for labour,

Statislics show that fewer men are to-day producing more automobiles than ever before, but hundreds of allied industries offering thousands of new jobs which would never have existed otherwise, have sprung from the motor car. In seven years radio has expanded Its employment from scores to thousands of,workers: oil heating hes opened hundreds of new positions; electric refrigeration, virtually unknown a decade ago, now employs an army of workers; from 1920 to 1927 the motion picture industry expanded its employment from thousands to tens of thousands; hotels and restaurants utilise 25 per cent, more persons than seven years ago, and the greater diffusing wealth has in seven vears given employment to a great many more teacher and professors, lawyers and clergymen, journalists and" others. . , It is the transitional stage between the increased production made possible by improved machinery and the development of new industry made possible by the accompanying release of capital and labour that presents the problem which industry and labour must mutually and constiuctixely meet The increasing use of the machine has thus far proved to be beneficial alike to industry and labour, and there is no apparent reason to believe that it will not continue to be beneficial. _______