I found the manufacturers of Akron deeply grateful to them. They came when they were wanted and took themselves away when they were no longer wanted. Without them it would have been impossible to build industries so rapidly to meet the demands of a day, and if they did not take themselves off when the slump came they would create a disagreeable responsibility for the manufacturer who got them together. It is a situation that is purely American and would leave bewildered any one who tried to fix European ideas of industrial organization upon American institutions.
No Upheaval When Labor Turnover Makes Jobs Vacant
At the plant of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron I was told that the plant had been reduced from 30,000 men to 6,000 men in less than six months without turning men off wholesale. The labor turnover did the trick. The plant stopped taking on new men several months ago, when it began to look as if the strong demand for tires was not going to hold. Each week thereafter some of the migratory workers left. Normally they would have been replaced by new migratory workers who presented themselves for jobs, but in this way each week the payroll decreased automatically. Week after week the usual number of men called for their time and struck out, some because it was summer and their native mountains called them, some to wander further afield into other industrial towns. This went on all summer and fall and when, in November, it became necessary, the management thought, to curtail production sharply there were only 14,000 instead of 30,000 in the plant. The rest had disappeared in the normal labor turnover. In the other rubber plants in Akron the same process went on, so it was not a case of turning tens of thousands of men into the streets when the real slump came.
Much the same thing happened in Detroit. Last year it had more than 100,000 more people than it could properly house. These people had been drawn into Detroit by the high wages. Handy men with intelligence were getting $15 to $30 and more a day. Then came the slump in the automobile market. Beginning last May, the demand for labor in Detroit began to decrease, factories took on fewer men, but the city did not become crowded with idle men. For a certain number took their time each week and moved on. The overpopulation began to disappear. Detroit as a working man’s bonanza was working out. Coming eastward in November from the Pacific Coast, I encountered everywhere men with a few hundred dollars in their pockets, “easy money,” made in Detroit, looking now for something else. By the time I reached Detroit I found the factories had 150,000 less workmen than they had four months before and there was no idle “proletariat” standing about.
Not Possible in Europe.
It is only in wonderfully rich America such things can happen. Here alone we dare organize industry on this bonanza scale. In Europe the big industrials know that if they build in this rapid fashion they must be prepared for the slump. The soil will not reabsorb the migratory workers as it has done for Akron and Detroit. In Europe the workers belong to a proletariat divorced from the soil, descendants of a long line of workmen. They are also class conscious and they do not conveniently disappear in the labor turnover.
Thanks to the different state of affairs in America the present readjustment in the country is going on with little difficulty from the side of labor. In Europe, where there is a process of social revolution, there can be no thought of a readjustment of any kind without first finding out what effect it is going to have on the working classes. But here there is no proletariat, no hard and fast working classes, hence no class consciousness.
I have found recently in my travels about the country that all kinds of people are agreed that prices, rents, wages, everything must come down to somewhere near what they were. Before talking to labor leaders I find the same reasonableness. This would be impossible if there were any sentiment for class war.
Now is the time to test how much of the social turmoil in Europe has been communicated to us. Flush times are passing and whatever discontent there is is sure to show itself. I may be looking for something too precise, but I do not find it. There is the usual discontent over the struggle for existence, but it is not class conscious, as the phrase is used in revolutionary circles abroad. The situation has not even increased the following of the I. W. W. or of the industrial union movement. It would seem like a propitious moment to make a drive, a campaign of instruction, in the effort to convince workmen that industrial unionism is their way to economic freedom. But I see very small signs of such activity.
In Eastern Europe in its present frame of mind a readjustment could not take place without workmen seizing rifles and machine guns and making armed demands. Such doings are not in the American picture.