The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-06-02

sitions. By speeding up workers to the limit, driving them for ille- gal hours of fake partnership agreements, employing them on bed rock and skinning them in the end, so-called operators" have been able to force through enough low grade dirt to pay the coal bills, the grocery bills and dance a little rag i time; to support this fraternal or ganization or that, and to keep a number of parasites going who in other places would have to get in and earn their bread with the sweat of their brow.
 But during the past winter, thanks to the unusually rotten con- dition of mining things the camp got down to bed rock. Not in years have business men been 60 hard pressed; not in years have they uttered complaints so loud and so long as to the conditions which were with us and ahead of us.
 They have suddenly realized that the low grade dirt will admit only just so much exploitation and that mo prosperity can be built perma- nently out of the hide of labor if Il is not in the ground to which labor applies itself.
 For the worker conditions are not so serious. The man who pro- duces all wealth, knows to his wealth production and to his ex- ploitation there is a strict limit He can get out and will get out. He i, not likely to waste his life endeavor- ing to support the metropolitan ambitions of a jerkwater town. NUr is he going to peddle lot ot hot air to himself and eat snow balls for his pains. He cannot atord with the wages paid and the oppor- tunity of work given him to pay one cent more for the commodities than he is now paying.
 He cannot afford to keep so many non-producers enjoying q pleasant life of non-production any longer. He has packed the whole caboodle of them for many years long after he himself made any sort of a half way decent living. Time and time again he has protested against the efforts continuous and persistent to lower his wages while the price of necessities went ib. From the four dollar scale to the three dollars a day scale went his wages while everything he bought. food and clothing went up all the time, steadily and consistently. Those who did not do the work which was producing wealth but whose activities were concentrated in tearing a chunk of that which labor had produced, lamented that the ground was low grade and couldn't stand any higher wages. This was the argument heard anu it was upon this argument that wages were reduced, that the eight hour law was evaded and the eva sion justified. The point is wholly ignored that low grade mine that cannot pay wages might as we'll be closed down, unless tho workers are willing that by an intensified labor power and a further decrease in the standard of living they are to con- tinue the process of providing a living for a wholly out of propor- tionate number of non-producers in every line of business and every line of parasitism. That is to say it has all to come out of the work CTS hide.
 There have been good many who were willing enough. There have been men whose condition was 50 abject and whose need for money so severe that they have been willing to contribute to a continuance of this condition. They scabbed and they became party to an evasion of the eight hour law. They sought first tho job and just so long as the job afforded them a living, for the time being accepted lit
 Economic stress forced some to scab who would otherwise possibly not do so, but it is quite apparent ! that with tho low grade mines re- quiring in the estimation of busi- ness men complete sacrifice from