CHAPTER XXVI[ToC]
THE MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISE
186. Preponderance of Economic Interests.—Such a social centre as the city has several functions to perform for its inhabitants. Though primarily concerned with business, the people have other interests to be conserved; the city, therefore, has governmental, educational, and recreational functions as a social organization, and within its limits all kinds of human concerns find their sponsors and supporters. Unquestionably, the economic interests are preponderant. On the principle that social structure corresponds to function, the structure of the city lends itself to the performance of the economic function. Business streets are the principal thoroughfares. Districts near the great factories are crowded with the tenements that shelter the workers. Little room is left for breathing-places in town, and little leisure in which to breathe. Government is usually in the hands of professional politicians who are too willing to take their orders from the cohort captains of business. Morals, æsthetics, and recreation are all subordinate to business. Even religion is mainly an affair of Sunday, and appears to be of relatively small consequence compared with business or recreation. The great problems of the city are consequently economic at bottom. Poverty and misery, drunkenness, unemployment, and crime are all traceable in part, at least, to economic deficiency. Economic readjustments constitute the crying need of the twentieth-century city.
187. The Manufacturing Industry.—It is the function of the agriculturist and the herdsman, the miner and the lumberman, to produce the raw material. The sailor and the train-hand, the longshoreman and the teamster, transport them to the industrial centres. It is the business of the manufacturer and his employees to turn them into the finished product for the use of society. Manufacturing is the leading occupation in thousands of busy towns and small cities of all the industrial nations of western Europe and America, and shares with commerce and trade as a leading enterprise in the cosmopolitan centres. The merchant or financier who thinks his type of emporium or exchange is the only municipal centre of consequence, needs only to mount to the top of a tall building or climb a suburban hill where he can look off over the city and see the many smoking chimneys, to realize the importance of the factory. With thousands of tenement-house dwellers it is as natural to fall into the occupation of a factory hand as in the rural regions for the youth to become a farmer. The growing child who leaves school to help support the family has never learned a craftsman's trade, but he may find a subordinate place among the mill or factory hands until he gains enough skill to handle a machine. From that time until age compels him to join the ranks of the unemployed he is bound to his machine, as firmly as the mediæval serf was bound to the soil. Theoretically he is free to sell his labor in the highest market and to cross the continent if he will, but actually he is the slave of his employer, for he and his family are dependent upon his daily wage, and he cannot afford to lose that wage in order to make inquiries about the labor market elsewhere. Theoretically he is a citizen possessed of the franchise and equal in privilege and importance to his employer as a member of society, but actually he must vote for the party or the man who is most likely to benefit him economically, and he knows that he occupies a position of far less importance politically and socially than his employer. Employment is an essential in making a living, but it is an instrument that cuts two ways—it establishes an aristocracy of wealth and privilege for the employer and a servile class of employees who often are little better than peasants of the belt and wheel.
188. History of Manufacturing.—The history of the manufacturing industry is a curious succession of enslavement and emancipation. Until within a century and a half it was closely connected with the home. Primitive women fashioned the utensils and clothing of the primitive family, and when slaves were introduced into the household it became their task to perform those functions. The slave was a bondman. Neither his person nor his time was his own, and he could not hold property; but he was taken care of, fed and clothed and housed, and by a humane master was kindly treated and even made a friend. When the slave became a serf on the manorial estate of mediæval Europe, manufacturing was still a household employment and old methods were still in use. These sufficed, as there was little outside demand from potential buyers, due to general poverty and lack of the means of exchange and transportation. Certain industries became localized, like the forging of iron instruments at the smithy and the grinding of grain at the mill, and the monastery buildings included apartments for various kinds of handicraft, but the factory was not yet. Then artisans found their way to the town, associated themselves with others of their craft, and accepted the relation of journeyman in the employ of a master workman; there, too, the young apprentice learned his trade without remuneration. The group was a small one. For greater strength in local rivalries they organized craft guilds or associations, and established over all members convenient rules and restrictions. Increasing opportunities for exchange of goods stimulated production, but the output of hand labor was limited in amount. The position of the craftsman locally was increasingly important, and his fortunes were improving. The craft guilds successfully disputed with their rivals for a share in the government of the city; there was democracy in the guild, for master and journeyman were both included, and they had interests much in common. A journeyman confidently expected to become a master in a workshop of his own.
189. Alteration of Status.—Under the factory system the employee becomes one of many industrial units, having no social or guild relation to his employer, receiving a money wage as a quit claim from his employer, and dependent upon himself for labor and a living. For a time after the factory system came into vogue there were small shops where the employer busied himself among his men and personally superintended them, but the large factory tends to displace the small workshop, the corporation takes the place of the individual employer, and the employee becomes as impersonal a cog in the labor system as is any part of the machine at which he works. It used to be the case that a thrifty workman might hope to become in the future an employer, but now he has become a permanent member of a distinct class, for the large capital required for manufacturing is beyond his reach. The manufacturing industry is continually passing under the management of fewer individuals, while the number of operatives in each factory tends to increase. With concentration of management goes concentration of wealth, and the gap widens between rich and poor. Out of the modern factory system has come the industrial problem with all its varieties of skilled and unskilled work, woman and child labor, sweating, wages, hours and conditions of labor, unemployment, and other difficulties.
190. The Working Grind.—There are many manufacturing towns and small cities that are built on one industry. Thousands of workers, young and old, answer the morning summons of the whistle and pour into the factory for a day's labor at the machine. A brief recess at noon and the work is renewed for the second half of the day. Weary at night, the workers tramp home to the tenements, or hang to the trolley strap that is the symbol of the five-cent commuter, and recuperate for the next day's toil. They are cogs in the great wheel of industry, units in the great sum of human energy, indispensable elements in the progress of economic success. Sometimes they seem less prized than the costly machines at which they work, sometimes they fall exhausted in the ranks, as the soldier in the trenches drops under the attack, but they are absolutely essential to wealth and they are learning that they are indispensable to one another. In the development of social organization the working people are gaining a larger part. The factory is educating them to a consciousness of the solidarity of their class interests. All class organizations have their faults, but they teach their members group values and the dependence of the individual on his fellows.
191. The Benefits of the New Industry to the Workers.—It must not be supposed that the industrial revolution and the age of machinery have been a social misfortune. The benefits that have come to the laboring people, as well as to their employers, must be put into the balance against the evils. There is first of all the great increase of manufactured products that have been shared in by the workers and the greatly reduced price of many necessaries of life, such as matches, pins, and cooking utensils. Invention has eased many kinds of labor and taken them away from the overburdened housewife, and new machinery is constantly lightening the burden of the farm and the home. Invention has broadened the scope of labor, opening continually new avenues to the workers. It is difficult to see how the rapidly increasing number of people in the United States could have found employment without the typewriter, the automobile, and the numerous varieties of electrical application. The great number of modern conveniences that have come to be regarded as necessaries even in the homes of the working people, and the local improvements in streets and sidewalks, schools and playgrounds that are possible because of increasing wealth, are all due to the new type of industry.
Conditions of labor are better. Where building laws are in force, factories are lighter, cleaner, and better ventilated than were the houses and shops of the pre-factory age, and the hours of labor that are necessary to earn a living have been greatly reduced in most industries. There have been mental and moral gains, also. It requires mental application to handle machinery. An uneducated immigrant may soon learn to handle a simple machine, but the complicated machinery that the better-paid workmen tend requires intelligence, care, and sobriety. The age of machinery has brought with it emancipation from slavery, indenture, and imprisonment for debt, and has made possible a new status for the worker and his children. The laborer in America is a citizen with a vote and a right to his own opinion equal to that of his employer; he has time and money enough to buy and read the newspaper; and he is encouraged and helped to educate his children and to prepare them for a place in the sun that is ampler than his own.