Labor shortage

“ Even where good crops had been grown, in many places, there was question as to whether or not sufficient labor could be secured to harvest them. [72] Again, in some instances, industries like farming had been completely paralyzed; in others they had been greatly retarded, owing to the necessity of breaking in new men to occupy the places of experienced workers who had left for the North. The lumber mills, mines, docks, and cotton oil mills all suffered from the effects of labor shortage. ”

“ You can pick up newspapers, the San Jose Mercury News, headline: "Worker Shortage Crippling Farmers." It goes on and depicts it.
Morgan Hill: Farmers are reporting a shortage of labor to harvest crops forcing them to take huge losses. The impact is mixed, varying with the amount and type of crops a farmer is growing. Those growing more fragile crops such as strawberries and peppers have been scrambling to find enough workers to pick the harvest.
This goes on to say they cannot harvest their yields. Labor pains increasing for the great San Joaquin Valley that Senator Craig spoke about. ”

“ As the border with Mexico tightens, and Congress continues to drag its feet on passing comprehensive immigration reform, farmers and labor experts say that the California farm labor pool is rapidly shrinking. A lag in reporting labor statistics makes it hard to pinpoint exactly how short the labor supply really is, but many growers put the gap again at about 10 to 20 percent shortage Statewide. ”

“ The bureaus would direct the job applicants to industries and positions where labor was most urgently needed. Because of the shortage of skilled labor, however, enterprise managers continued to hire new labor without regard to the requirements of the law.
The shortage of adequately trained personnel adversely affects the utilization of available capacity; it entails frequent breakdowns of machinery and inhibits multishift operation of plants. More than 20 percent of worktime is usually lost through idling, and equipment is used at no more than 50 to 60 percent of capacity. ”

“ The lag of productivity has been attributed by the Central Committee to a pronounced shortage of skilled manpower and to various manifestations of poor labor discipline and faulty management. Chief among the cited shortcomings in the field of labor are excessive absenteeism, resulting in part from inadequate medical and public dining facilities ”

“ FARM LABOR
The agricultural labor force presents a paradox of substantial underemployment associated with widespread labor shortages, particularly of more productive, skilled personnel; the shortages are especially prevalent during the planting and harvesting seasons. This phenomenon is an outgrowth primarily of a progressive qualitative deterioration of the agricultural manpower pool, owing to a continuing transfer of predominantly young male workers into nonagricultural occupations. ”

“ This check to production, beginning at the basis of interlaced industry, propagates itself from exchange point to exchange point, cessation of supply becoming failure of demand, until, so to speak, the whole machine is thrown out of gear, and the spectacle is everywhere presented of labor going to waste while laborers suffer from want.
This strange and unnatural spectacle of large numbers of willing men who cannot find employment is enough to suggest the true cause to whomsoever can think consecutively. ”

“ The constant effort to obtain the maximum of production at the minimum of cost operates injuriously upon employer and employee alike; while the shrinkage in money circulation, caused by the competition, reduces, in every branch of industry, the wages of those who are the great consumers as well as producers; it produces those "hard times" which bear so hardly upon the poor in every walk of life. Even the laboring man has entered the race, and now competes in the labor market with his fellow for an opportunity to make a crust of bread to feed his wife and child. ”

“ Men and women are being hurled into the ranks of the unemployed by thousands and by hundreds of thousands. We must reduce the number of jobless workers.
We must organize along industrial lines to shorten the hours of labor. If an eight-hour day were inaugurated, it would mean the additional employment of millions of men and women in America tomorrow. It would insure us leisure for study and recreation—for work of organization and education, and it would mean higher wages in America generally. For the fewer men there are competing for jobs, the higher the wage they are able to demand. ”

“ At the same time, it is clear that, from the discouragement of immigration and limitation to eight hours of the daily toil, there results an exceptional scarcity of labor, which cramps the development of the country, and causes a depression in trade which must soon diminish the wage-fund, and react upon the working men. ”

“ It is notorious, moreover, that the smallest employers, such as the owners of sweat shops, nearly always on the verge of bankruptcy and sometimes on the verge of starvation themselves, are harder on their labor than the industrial combinations, and that in competitive establishments, like textile mills, the periods when employers are forced to close down altogether are far more frequent, [Pg 341] making the average wages the year round far below those paid by any of the trusts. ”

“ The capitalist farming system expels the agricultural laborer from the village; the machine expels the craftsman from the ranks of skilled labor; the perpetual competition and consolidation of capital in every trade alternately destroys employment in that trade and disorganises others. Overproduction in one year leaves thousands of workers wageless in the next. The ranks of unskilled labor, the army of the unemployed, are day by day recruited in these fashions. ”

“ Enforced industry and economy is not thrift. When by low wages or grinding conditions the necessities of life are with difficulty secured, the very opposite disposition may be cultivated. When the external restraints are removed, the wildest extravagance may be indulged in. This is sometimes given as an excuse for low, grinding wages; that "the workmen and their wives have no idea of saving;" that higher wages would be wasted in foolish extravagance.
No one in normal conditions will be wasteful of that which has cost him hard labor. ”

“ The first appearance of hard times is followed by a decrease in the working force. The least curtailment in orders leads to part-time work. Wage rates are not cut—that method is crude and disastrous—but men and women are laid off temporarily or permanently. Bonds still draw their interest; the dividends are paid on stocks; and labor waits for a job. The defender of property income will say at once,—"If there is nothing to do, why pay labor?" ”

“ Goods are piled up in store without sale, while great numbers of the laboring community are ragged, and are begging from door to door for old clothes to shield themselves and their families from the piercing cold; and for the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich, to keep them from starving! Was such a state of things really the result of over-production? If this be indeed the case, public measures should be taken to avert such disasters by preventing the excess of labor. ”

“ In other words, limitation and curtailment of resources inevitably tend to poverty, and development and use of resources surely tend to prosperity and comfort. The limitations of the unions, all of them, are on the line of non-accomplishment, and are avowedly designed to hinder or check production. They are adopted on the theory that with less production wages will rise, and in the rise of wages the laborer will receive as much compensation for one day's labor as he otherwise would for two days' labor. ”

“ On the other hand, the men who use the opportunity offered by a scarcity of labor to exact wages higher than the average of their class, without doing more than the average work in return, are merely laying up trouble for themselves in the long run. They grow accustomed to a high rate of living and expenditure, and when the inevitable turn comes and they are either thrown out of employment or forced to accept low wages, they are the losers by the whole transaction. ”

“ But the net result of the investigation was well put in the terse statement of the report, that “about one-third of the total persons engaged in remunerative labor were unemployed at their principal occupation for about one-third of the working time.” At the lowest estimate the whole working population lost on the average almost one-tenth of their working time. The loss of such a proportion of the community’s productive force, with all the demoralization attendant upon irregular or no labor, is evidence of a problem of grave import. ”

“ Everybody was being thrown out of employment, and distress to the point of starvation ensued. In the very worst days of that panic some of the largest and most charitable employers of labor met their employees in a monster mass meeting, and reported that while they could not pay in full and nothing apparently was in prospect but an actual shutdown, they had succeeded in getting enough cash to keep all their employees, provided they would take weekly half what was owing to them in money, and the short-time notes or obligations of the firms, or even of banks, for the remainder. ”

“ The whole fabric of Organized Labor is bleeding. The labor movement is in a most critical state. So critical, in fact, that it will never be able to recover unless it quickly and radically changes its policies. The American working class is now imminently confronted with the tragic menace of having its trade union movement obliterated. ”

“ But if it coincides with a period of business depression the introduction of machinery appears to be the cause of a large displacement of labor, which might more truly be ascribed to industrial depression. This last cause is responsible for enormous suffering among the laboring classes, for the method oftenest resorted to by industrial enterprises to reduce expenses is the wholesale discharge of laborers, who are thus made to bear the burden of industrial disorganization. ”

“ There is a general decline in wages throughout the land, which, giving rise to labor disputes and strikes, is taken advantage of by the unemployed, who gladly pick up the tools thrown down by the strikers.
Sweating, starvation wages, armies of unemployed, and great numbers of the homeless and shelterless are inevitable when there are more men to do work than there is work for men to do. ”

“ While the necessities of the workers set the minimum below which wages cannot fall, and their physical endurance sets the maximum hours beyond which they cannot work, the labor-union, by means of the strike or the threat to strike, sets a higher minimum of wages and a lower maximum of hours, which leaves room for ambition. Eventually the higher wage and the shorter hours become habitual and become a higher level of necessities. Gifted individuals may, indeed, rise above the wage-earning class by their own efforts, but labor organization alone can raise the class as a whole. ”

“ Wage cuts totalling in the aggregate many hundreds of millions of purchasing power have been imposed upon the workers. In addition the Trade Unions have borne a dead-weight burden in the form of abnormal unemployment, which has depleted their financial reserves, and with a falling membership the yearly income of the unions has been substantially reduced. ”

“ Here and there the councils of labor are still darkened by the theory that only by limiting individual production can there be any assurance of permanent employment for increasing numbers, but in general, management and wage earner alike have become emancipated from this doom and have entered a new era in industrial thought which has unleashed the productive capacity of the individual worker with an increasing scale of wages and profits, the end of which is not yet. ”

“ The average wages of 1880 indicated that this mass of semi-pauperized labor is rapidly increasing, and that its condition has become 25 per cent worse in ten years. The shadow of the old-world proletariat is thus seen to be stealing upon our shores. It is for specialists in political economy to study this problem in the light of the large social forces that are working such an alarming change in our American society. ”

“ That the continued and increasing depression of the manufacturing, commercial, and agricultural interests of this country, and the wide-spreading distress of the working classes, are most alarming:—manufacturers without a market, and shipping without freight; capital without investment, trade without profit; and farmers struggling under a system of high rents, with prices falling, as the means of consumption by the people fail; a working population rapidly increasing, and a daily decreasing demand for its labour ”

“ An unfortunate condition is certainly presented when any who are willing to labor are unemployed, but so far as this condition now exists among our people it must be conceded to be a result of phenomenal business depression and the stagnation of all enterprises in which labor is a factor. With the advent of settled and wholesome financial and economic governmental policies and consequent encouragement to the activity of capital the misfortunes of unemployed labor should, to a great extent at least, be remedied. ”

“ Notwithstanding the frequency of cases of this sort, it is, we think, clear that a majority of those who, in any given state of trade, come into distress through long-continued unemployment or chronic "under-employment," are—with many individual exceptions—either the less strong or the less fit, the less skilled or the less capable, the less responsible or the less regular in their industry of the wage-earning community. ”