§1.If it were true that all the labour of the wage-earning classes which went to produce the real national income were, or tended to become, monotonous and highly specialised machine tending, the workers constantly engaged in close repetition of some single narrow automatic process, contributing to some final composite product whose form and utility had no real meaning for them, the tale of human costs would be appalling.
Fortunately this is not the whole truth about labour.Even the charge against machinery of mechanising the worker is frequently overstated.The only productive work that is entirely automatic is done by machines.For the main trend of the development of industrial machinery has been to set non-human tools and power to undertake work which man could not execute with the required regularity, exactitude, or pace, by reason of certain organic deficiencies.While, then, the sub-divided labour in most staple industries is mostly of a narrowly prescribed and routine character, it is hardly ever so completely uniform and repetitive as that done by a machine.
Purely routine work, demanding no human skill or judgment is nearly always undertaken by machinery, except where human labour can be bought so cheap that it does not pay to invent and apply machinery so as to secure some slightly increased regularity or pace of output.Where, then, as in most modern factories, human labour cooperates with, tends and feeds machinery, this human labour is of a less purely repetitive character than the work done by the machines.Some portions of the labour, at any rate, contain elements of skill or judgment, and are not entirely uniform.
We can in fact distinguish many kinds and grades of human cooperation with machinery.In some of them man is the habitual servant, in others the habitual master of the machine; in others, again, the relation is more indirect or incidental.Though an increasing number of the processes in the making and moving of most forms of material goods involves the use of machinery and power, they do not involve, as is sometimes supposed, the employment of a growing proportion of the workers in the merely routine labour of tending the machines.Such a supposition, indeed, is inconsistent with the primary economy of machinery, the so-called labour-saving property.
It might, indeed, be the case that the machine economy was accompanied by so vast an increase of demand for machine-made goods, that the quantity of labour required for tending the machines was greater than that formerly required for making by hand the smaller quantity.In some trades this is no doubt so, as for instance in the printing trade, and in some branches of textile industry where the home market is largely supplemented by export trade.But the displacement of machine-tenders by automatic machines is advancing in many of the highly-developed machine industries.The modern flour or paper mill, for instance, performs nearly all its feeding processes by mechanical means while in the textile trade automatic spindles and looms have reduced the number and changed the character of the work of minders.
More and more of this work means bringing human elements of skill and judgment and responsibility to bear in adjusting or correcting the irregularities or errors in the operations of machinery.Machines are liable to run down, become clogged, break, or otherwise 'go wrong'.These errors they can often be made to announce by automatic signals, but human care is needed for their correction.This work, however monotonous and fatiguing to muscles or nerves, is not and cannot be entirely repetitive.
In many other processes where the machine is said to do the work, human skill and practice are required to set and to regulate the operations of the machine.The use of automatic lathes is an instance of cooperation in which some scope for human judgment remains.The metal and engineering trades are full of such instances.Though machinery is an exceedingly important and in many processes a governing factor, it cannot be said to reduce the labour that works with it to its own automatic level.On the contrary, it may be taken as generally true that, in the processes where machinery has reached its most complex development, an increased share of the labour employed in close connection with the machinery is that of the skilled engineer or fitter rather than of the mere tender.The heaviest and the most costly labour in these trades is usually found in the processes where it has not been found practicable or economical to apply machinery.Indeed, the general tendency, especially noticed in America, in the metal trades, has been to substitute for a large employment of skilled hand labour of a narrowly specialised order, a small employment of more skilled and responsible supervisors of machinery and a large employment of low-skilled manual labour in the less mechanical departments, such as furnace work and other operations preparatory to the machine processes.
§2.Though accurate statistics are not available, it appears that in this country the proportion of the working population employed in manufactures is not increasing, and it is more than probable that an exact analysis of the nature of the work of our factories and workshops would show that the proportion engaged in direct attendance on machinery was steadily falling.
