Industrial problem

“ We have here the problem of bigness. Its lesson should by now have been burned into our memory by Brandeis. The Curse of Bigness shows how size can become a menace-both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace- because of its control of prices. [2] Control of prices in the steel industry i powerful leverage on our economy. For the price of steel determines the price of hundreds of other articles. ”

“ The direct causal connection between the increased productive power of modern machinery and trade depression clearly emerges from a comparison of the fluctuations in the several departments of industry in different industrial countries. ”

“ Here is a case of arrested development in the evolution of industry. It is even worse than that; for some trades which had been subject to the concentrating force of the factory system, have fallen into a sort of back-wash of the industrial current, and broken up again into smaller units. ”

“ That's the kernel of the industrial question. Industry has passed out of the alluvial stage into the reefing. We must have machinery to work with or we may all starve in the midst of mountains of gold. ”

“ Then steam was applied to industry; the machine replaced the man; semi-skilled and unskilled labor replaced skilled labor; great numbers of men and women, and even of children, crowded together in factories to spin thread, make bolts and washers, weave ribbon, bake bread, manufacture machinery, or do some one of the many hundreds of things now done in factories. The change from home industry to factory industry is well named the Industrial Revolution. It completely overturned the established and accepted means of making a living. ”

“ It was provincial in thought, speech, and habits. It was given over to agriculture, small trade, and rude home manufacture. Presently came the revolutionary inventions of textile machinery, of the steam-engine, and of processes for extracting and utilizing coal and iron. The heavy, costly machinery required capital and the factory. Concentrated capital and machinery required workers. The working people were forced to give up their small home manufacturing and their unprofitable farming and move to the industrial barracks and workrooms of the manufacturing centres. ”

“ In the hurry of the Industrial Revolution, invention proceeded at an accelerating pace, and the introduction of some new appliance into a single industry might reduce the demand for labour by a quarter, or a half, or even three-quarters, and almost depopulate a town at a single blow. ”

“ The equipment with which men work today can be divided into separate individual shares only at the cost of incalculable embarrassment to industry. Before the days of machiinery, and aggregated capital, and the application of science to methods of production, no calamity less than war, famine or pestilence could produce equal industrial disturbance. ”

“ Only after we have mastered the principles upon which American industry is based, shall we be in a position to solve the problems which arise directly from the nature of our economic organization.
46. INDUSTRIAL REFORM.—Our industrial life is so clearly based upon certain fundamental institutions, such as private property, free contract, and free competition, that an industrial "system" is said to exist. Certain great evils, notably poverty, have accompanied the development of this system. ”

“ The influences of machine-production upon the size of the units of capital, the intensification and limitation of competition; the natural formation of Trusts and other forms of economic monopoly of capital; trade depressions and grave industrial disorders due to discrepancies between individual and social interests in the working of modern methods of production. ”

“ What are the boundaries that divide the Jack of all Trades, the specialist and the victim of an overdose of repetition work.
Why industrial managers should know the cardinal principles of invention, of industrial engineering, industrial management, industrial relations and the human factor in engineering and in the industries.
Why a plant may be growing in size and paying dividends and may still be dead so far as the spirit of enterprise is concerned.
Why some men try to manage industrial plants regardless of the cardinal principles of progress of workers and the state. ”

“ Long hours, the employment of women and children, the weakened economic position of the laborer, fluctuations in production, liability to be without employment, industrial accidents, the abolition of personal ties between employer and employe, the crowding of workmen into a small space to work by day and their concentration in city tenements by night—these are some of the problems for which the factory system must be held responsible. The condition and position of labor have been vitally affected. ”

“ The keeping of the industrial balance, therefore, and adjusting the several industrial processes to one another's work and needs, is a matter of grave and far-reaching consequence in any modern community, as has already been shown. ”

“ And yet there is in modern industry a certain regularity of outline, and a general tendency to follow the economic laws discussed in the preceding three chapters. This circumstance prevents us from concluding that our industrial life is entirely a haphazard affair. ”

“ It is probable that under existing conditions, some such changes as these are all we can hope for over large areas of industrial life; perhaps, indeed, without a general recognition of the real social significance of large scale production, the best we can ever do will consist of further modification of industrial conditions along these lines. ”

“ MANUFACTURERS AND NEW INDUSTRIES.
One of the forces that operates against increase in the number of industrial establishments is the fact that we do not realize the need of human progress in our plants. ”

“ Moreover, as an offset against the growth of material wealth, machinery has been a direct agent in producing certain material and moral maladies which impair the health of modern industrial communities.
"The unprecedented rapidity and irregularity of the discovery and adoption of the new methods make it impossible for the structure of industrial society to adjust itself at once to the conditions of the new environment. ”

“ The industrial overlord holds control of the job with one hand. With the other he controls the product of industry. From the time the raw material leaves the earth in the form of iron ore, crude petroleum, logs, or coal, through all of the processes of production, it is owned by the industrial master, not by the worker. Workers separate the product from the earth, transport it, refine it, fabricate it. Always, the product, like the machinery, is the possession of the owning class. ”

“ The social and moral progress of industrial nations requires, as a first condition of orderly progress, that these cases of arrested growth shall be absorbed into the general mass of machine-industry. ”

“ The key is furnished by the storms raging through the industrial life of the present. You see how penuriously the owners of the factories, of the mines, cling to their privileges, and will not yield the breadth of an inch. ”

“ The only remedy for this danger would be the advancement of manufacturing and its reorganization upon a vaster and better conceived plan than the present one, if, at the same time that any industrial progress gave more wealth for less labor, it did not give rise to still more new wants. ”

“ The only difficulty is under the patch work industrial system of today where a few men own all the earth, and all the factories and mills and are compelled to sell their product to the workingman, they give him such a small share of that product that the workingmen haven't anything to buy it with. ”

“ They have learned, that whenever an industrial system produces conditions, which make the laborer see only disaster for his individual interests, in every labor-saving invention which may be introduced ”

“ In centralizing manufacturing plants in cities, certain industrial economies are secured, such as: (1) economy in motor power, whether it be water or coal; (2) economy in machinery—it is not necessary to duplicate machines ”

“ In industry it is difficult to recognize, because every civilized nation in a healthy state of development must present an extension of industrial production, for the following four reasons: 1. Because occupations that were formerly domestic in character have been taken over by industry. ”

“ Men by the pressure of competition are forced to seek out the easiest and most direct methods, and to learn how to secure the greatest results with the least expenditure of labor and material.
It is this principle which lies at the very root of our industrial development. ”

“ Production has somewhere been checked and this reduction in the supply of some things has shown itself in cessation of demand for others, the check propagating itself through the whole framework of industry and exchange.
The real obstacle The industrial pyramid manifestly rests on the land. ”

“ Many of the evils commonly classified as belonging to specific industries, in particular the foul atmosphere, imperfect sanitation, and overcrowding, which are found in many factories and most city workshops, are rightly regarded as town-made rather than trade-made, for they are the normal and often the necessary accompaniments of a congested industrial population. ”

“ And this third great party should be given its proper share of any gain. In fact, a glance at industrial history shows that in the end the whole people receive the greater part of the benefit coming from industrial improvements. In the past hundred years, for example, the greatest factor tending toward increasing the output, and thereby the prosperity of the civilized world, has been the introduction of machinery to replace hand labor. And without doubt the greatest gain through this change has come to the whole people—the consumer. ”

“ Professor Marshall summarizes the tendency in the following words--"We are thus led to a general rule, the action of which is more prominent in some branches of manufacture than others, but which applies to all. It is, that any manufacturing operation that can be reduced to uniformity, so that the same thing has to be done over and over again in the same way, is sure to be taken over sooner or later by machinery. ”

“ The factories and workshops are idle or are ill-equipped, for materials, tools, and fuel are everywhere lacking; unemployment holds large industrial populations in destitution and despair. Even where plant and materials are present, the physical strength of the workers is so let down that efficient productivity is impossible. ”

“ The spread of the modern industrial system has brought with it the modern state, with its millions of consumers, its vast area, its innumerable activities, its complicated code of industrial and commercial law. At the same time, the revolution in the means of transport and communication has destroyed, or is tending to destroy, local markets, and closely interwoven all the business of the world. ”

“ Under these circumstances, and in proportion as these technological exigencies take effect in one branch of industry and another, the usufruct of the industrial community’s current productive efficiency comes to vest effectually in those who own the material means of industry. Their effectual exploitation of the community’s industrial efficiency will extend to such industries, and with such a degree of thoroughness and security, as the state of the industrial arts may decide. ”

“ The belief that an industrial country has to concentrate its industries is not, in my opinion, well-founded. That is only a stage in industrial development. As we learn more about manufacturing and learn to make articles with interchangeable parts, then those parts can be made under the best possible conditions. ”

“ Manufacturers hesitate to admit that the mistakes of the present industrial methods are, in part at least, their own mistakes, systematized and extended. But take the question outside of a man's immediate concerns, and he sees the point readily enough. ”

“ The problems of industry are enormously aggravated by the fact that the numbers of individuals concerned even in particular plants, mills, mines, factories, stretch the capacities of human management too often beyond the possibilities of human understanding and sympathy. ”

“ Because he possesses not only a pair of hands, but also those means of production without which work is impossible nowadays: factories, land, machines, railroads, mines, ships and steamers, and all kinds of apparatus and instruments. ”

“ The most necessary products are often made in such a manner that they not only go through twenty or thirty hands in the same factory, but often pass from one factory to another in order to be completed. The raw material for the manufacture of these articles often comes from distant places, and railroads, mails, and telegraphs are vital to production. Now, if it happens that one wheel of this enormous mechanism of society stops, the whole of this particular industry is laid idle. ”

“ But raw materials stand unused, factories stand idle, railroad traffic continues to dwindle, merchants sell less and less, while millions of able-bodied men and women, in dire need, are clamoring for the opportunity to work. This is the awful paradox with which we are confronted, a stinging rebuke that challenges our power to operate the economic machine which we have created. ”

“ This was the commodity which you workers supply. It is human power, human labor-power.
One hundred years ago almost everything was produced by human labor-power, but gradually improved machinery has been invented that lessens the human toil needed to make things. Big machines, run by steam, or water-power, now do-most of the heavy and difficult work. But the owner of the mine or factory or mill needs one other commodity to guide the machines, to tend the machines and feed them. He needs your labor-power. ”