Effect of machinery.
The impression of workers that machinery is displacing them, must be received with a great deal of reserve as they rarely take long or broad views.
Mechanical aid is very imperfect in most of these trades, and in book folding, envelope making, black bordering, etc., its use has hitherto been greatly restricted owing to the nature of the work.
The census figures, moreover, seem to be pretty conclusive that, taking the trade as a whole, machinery cannot have had such a very destructive influence upon women's employment.[77]
[77] An old-established publisher commits himself to the statement that machinery has increased women's work by 20 per cent. The manager of a leading Scottish paper and stationery firm stated, with reference to envelope making: "The use of machinery is always extending; but only in the direction of increasing the output; there has been no displacing of workers; the result has been rather to increase their employment."
The following statement by a Trade Union official is at once the most emphatic and most detailed of a considerable mass of information on this subject:—
"Folding and stitching machines have largely superseded female labour and men's labour too. E.g., A. (a certain weekly paper), if folded, etc., by hand, would employ thirty hands—now it is all done by machinery. B. (another similar paper) by hand would employ 100 girls and, say, twenty or thirty men—now no girl touches it except just to insert 'things,' e.g., advertisements, and men merely pack it; machinery does the rest. Even wrapping is done by machinery—one machine with one man does the work of eight men. At X. (a well-known London firm) ten folding machines do the work of 100 girls."
As a matter of fact the papers referred to have been created by the cheap work of machines, and no labour has been displaced by their employment. They have rather increased the demand for labour. But the statement shows the efficiency of machinery worked under the best conditions.
Another statement by a woman worker, typical of many others, is as follows:—"Machinery is ruining the trade, and workers are being turned off; thirty were turned off a few months ago, and twenty more will have to go soon."
This applies to a certain well-known London firm of bookbinders, and it is curiously corroborated by other investigators who found in other firms traces of the women discharged from this one. The firm's own statement, however, was that they had to turn away "ten hands (young ones), the other day, because of the introduction of folding machines"; but this information was received five months before the woman employed quoted above was seen.[78]