4. Lost production, caused by ill health, physical defects and industrial accidents. (Page 8.)
With these various kinds of waste in mind the committee made a survey of some of the leading industries in the United States, and drew up a table showing the percentage of waste found in each industry. The figures were as follows:
| Men's Clothing Manufacturing | 63.78 | per cent |
| Building Industry | 53.00 | " " |
| Printing | 57.61 | " " |
| Boot and Shoe Manufacturing | 40.93 | " " |
| Metal Trades | 28.66 | " " |
| Textile Manufacturing | 49.20 | " " |
The bulk of the responsibility for this waste is placed on "management,"—the lowest percentage (50 per cent) in Textile Manufacturing, and the highest (81 per cent) in the Metal Trades. The remainder of the responsibility is shared by labor, with a minimum of 9 per cent in the Metal Trades and a maximum of 28 per cent in Printing, and by miscellaneous causes, with a minimum of 9 per cent in Men's Clothing and Printing and a maximum of 40 per cent in Textile Manufacturing. (Page 9.)
There are a number of angles from which this result may be viewed. Waste may be looked upon merely as the index of industrial inefficiency due to the failure of the industrial mechanism to adjust itself to the demands made upon it. In that case the remedy for the waste is superior adjustment of the present system to itself. On the other hand, if the waste is the result of friction generated within the system, there must be some change in the system before it can be eliminated. The latter explanation seems to tally with the facts more thoroughly than does the former. Certainly, the unrest, bitterness and general sabotage which are encountered throughout the industrial order would point to the conclusion that the economic system is generating its own condition of chaos.
Sabotage, or "go slow," is becoming the dominant note of the entire economic system. "Get the most you can out and put the least possible in," is the theory upon which both workers and owners are operating. There has been much comment upon the tendency of the workers to use the go slow tactics. The real withholding of productive effort, however, takes place among the owners and managers of industry.
Industrial leaders are well versed in the law of monopoly profit: "Minimum product at maximum price." The railroad men have rephrased the law thus: "All that the traffic will bear." Industry has been organized and capitalized and is now owned by a group whose interests lie, not in the extent of production, but in the volume of profit. When profit is no longer forthcoming, the owners practice the conscious withholding of efficiency. In accordance with this general policy the control of industry is shifting from the hands of engineers into the hands of financial experts "who are unremittingly engaged in a routine of acquisition, in which they habitually reach their ends by a shrewd restriction of output; and yet they continue to be entrusted with the community industrial welfare, which calls for maximum production." ("The Engineers and the Price System," Thorstein Veblen. Huebsch. 1921. p. 40-41.) The recent cry of the American farmer: "Produce only what you need for your own keep," is a crude effort to imitate the successful tactics of the business world in limiting production to the volume that will yield the greatest possible profit to the owner.
War-menace constitutes another indication of the chaos existing in modern economic society. The purpose of economic activity is to produce wealth. The purpose of war is to destroy it. The two are therefore in direct antagonism; yet the greatest war machines are maintained by the greatest industrial nations. To reply that they have the big war machines because they can afford to pay for them, is no conclusive answer. The organizing of nations for war came into present-day society with the present industrial system. Industrial leaders have engaged in a great competitive struggle from which the final appeal was always the appeal to arms. Furthermore, one of the most profitable businesses has been that of making the munitions and supplies required for the prosecution of war. Nor is there wanting evidence that modern wars have been made for profits—that they have been "commercial wars," as President Wilson put it.
There is no longer any question but that the forces behind the world war were in the main economic. The war was fought by capitalist empires, for the furtherance of capitalist enterprises. The publication of the secret treaties entered into by the Allies in 1916 gives conclusive proof of the land grabbing character of the Allies' intentions. There can scarcely be any question of the existence of similar intentions on the side of the Central Empires. The forces that constituted the war menace in 1914 were the economic forces arising out of the competitive economic régime that dominated the European world at that time.
Since the ending of the war, these forces have been augmented rather than abated. To them there must be added the other element of danger that threatens to throw Europe again into turmoil. Soviet Russia is and for a time must remain a source of international bitterness among the great capitalist nations, while the struggle for the control of the Near East is fraught with consequences as momentous as was the pre-war German dream of a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad. Unrest in Egypt, India, Korea, and the other countries held in subjection by the power of the bayonet; the contest between Japan, Britain and the United States for the control of the Pacific and the exploitation of China; the unrest and revolution that are stirring in China; the keen intensity of the struggle for foreign markets and for such strategic resources as the supply of petroleum, are all suggestive of a situation resembling an open gasoline can surrounded by lighted matches. And to add the last, and the most realistic touch to the picture, there are a million more men under arms in Europe than there were in 1913, while the military and naval authorities in all of the leading countries are busy planning how and where the next war is to be fought. (See "The Next War," Will Erwin. Dutton, 1921; "The Coming War with America," John MacLean. British Socialist Party, 1920; "War in the Future," F. von Bernbardi. Berlin, 1920; "The Inevitable War between Japan and America," F. Wencker. Stuttgart, 1921; "Coal, Iron and War," E.C. Eckel. New York, Holt, 1920, etc.) Before the grass was green over the graves where lies the flower of Europe's manhood, leaders of the present order were busy with the blueprints of another carnage.