The same tendency was observed in the carding departments of twenty-six woolen mills. The mill with the highest machine output per man per hour, namely 57.7 pounds, had a machinery-labor cost of twenty-three cents per hundred pounds, while the mill with a machine output of only six pounds per operative per hour had a cost of $1.64 per hundred pounds. Yet this mill, with a cost seven times higher than the other, paid its operatives only 9.86 cents per hour, as against 13.09 cents paid by its more successful competitor.
These examples could be repeated for every department of woolen and worsted mills, but will suffice to illustrate the point that higher wages do not necessarily mean higher costs. They show that mill efficiency depends more on a liberal use of the most improved machinery than on low wages. Thoughtful planning in arranging the machinery to save unnecessary steps to the employees, careful buying of raw materials, the efficient organization and utilization of the labor force in the mill, systematic watching of the thousands of details, each affecting the cost of manufacture, will reduce costs to an astonishing degree. When the board, therefore, states that the labor cost of production in this country is on the average, about double that in foreign countries, we must bear in mind the difference in costs in our own country, and the causes to which high costs are due. The fact is that the woolen industry, being one of the best, if not the best, protected industry in the country, shows an exceptional disposition to cling to old methods and to use machinery which long ago should have been consigned to the scrap-heap. That is where the chief cause of the comparatively high cost of production in a large part of the industry is to be looked for.
But, disregarding the question of efficiency, let us accept the figure of the Tariff Board, which found the labor cost in England to be one half that here, taking the manufacture from the time the wool enters the mill until it is turned out as finished cloth. The entire labor cost varies from twenty to fifty per cent. of the total cost of making cloth, according to the character of the cloth, and but seldom exceeds or approaches fifty per cent. If the protective duty is to measure the difference in labor cost, it should be fixed at not above twenty-five per cent. of the cost, that being the highest difference between the American and English labor cost. As against that, we now have a duty of about fifty-five per cent. of the selling price of the foreign cloth, in addition to the concealed protection in the so-called compensatory duty.
For decades we have been assured that all the manufacturer wanted was a duty high enough to compensate him for the higher wages paid in this country. In 1908 the Republican party laid down the formula that the tariff is to measure the difference in the cost of production at home and abroad, including a “reasonable profit to the manufacturer.” To-day the party has advocates of all kinds of protection, from those who wish the tariff to measure the difference in labor cost of the most efficient mills in this and foreign countries, as advocated by Senator LaFollette, to those who wish a tariff high enough to keep out foreign importations.
Whatever may be done with Schedule K by the Democratic Congress, it is time that we dismiss the hoary legend that the duties are maintained solely in the interest of the highly paid American working-man. The assertion comes with specially poor grace from the woolen and worsted industry, the most highly protected industry in the United States, paying the lowest wages to skilled labor. With the earnings of the great bulk of its employees averaging through the year less than ten dollars a week, while wages are about double that figure in less protected industries; with its workmen compelled to send their wives and children to the mills as an alternative to starvation on the man’s earnings; with the horrors of living conditions of the Lawrence mill-workers still ringing in our ears, it is time that we face the situation squarely and, whatever degree of protection we decide to maintain, that we frankly admit that it is primarily for the benefit of the capital invested in our industries.
Russia, Germany, and France do so frankly, and free-trade England manages to compete with them in the markets of the world, while paying higher wages to its employees. In turn we beat these nations, in their own and in the world’s markets, in the products of the very industries in which we pay the highest wages.
THE WINE OF NIGHT
BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER
COME, drink the mystic wine of Night,