The Connecticut labor news., 1922-08-25
AMERICAN LABOR ARE NOT 1SLACKERS,'
 SAYS U. s. OFFICIAL
Ethelbert Stewart Disproves Charge of Employer That Efficiency
 Has Dropped.

Not only is there no evidence of {
 general slackening of efficiency on the
 part of the American worker, but in
 number of industries increased efic
 iency Is shown, Ethelbert Stewart de. clares i'll the July issue of the Month ly Labor Review, published by the federal Department of Labor.
 MT. Stewart IS director of labor
 statistics and has been giving much attention to factory output, the re- suits of his investigations being made a basis for his discussion of labor efficiency.
 It is shown in the statement thar the foundation for much of the cur rent belief that the American work man is not producing as much as formerly is found in the general state ments which have no backing of sta tistical proof.
 There IS growing up very strong suspicion says Mr. Stewart, that unsupported charges of labor slacken- ing have contributed very large share to the hatred and bad blood that seem unfortunately to De on the increase as between the employing and employed portions of our popula tion"
 ~ Where there has been a falling of in production, MT. Stewart points out, the situation can be traced to the importation of ''cReap labor" by en1- ployers who sought to break down and degrade American standards.
 ,i''In such industries as the ifon and steel, coal mining, railroad construc- ton, brickmaking, and textile mills,' maintains Mr. Stewart, immigrant labor of 1ow-grade efficiency was sought for, and the industries in con sequence overrun by races physically weak, as, for example, the Italian, un- trained in any industrial occupation, as was practically all the southwest ern European immigration. These men are physically weak. They have neither the immediate strength nor the endurance to stand up under hard labor that the common labor of 40 years ago possessed, and as a result of this inability of immigrant labor to stand the work it did not prove cheap, and machinery has largely taken the place of common labor" MT Stewart produces a mass of statistics showing the variation of output in certain industries, which he attributes not to any deficiency on the part of the worker but to shop and mine conditions and handicaps inn posed by natural conditions. He finds it to be a fact that in nearly every instance the worker who is produc ing the smaller amount of output works much harder than does the worker who is producing more abun- dantly.
 Attacks being made upon labor by employers are denounced by MT Stewart as unfair" He says:
 t 'FXpu hear 1t said that before the war man would lay I,5oo bricks a day, that in Chicago they could get appo bricks laid per man per day, and that now 500 and 75o are all you can get. The fact is that any state fnent which does not go beyond the number of bricks laid by man in a day does not convey any adequate in formation. i@:+-It all depends upon whether a bricklayer was working on an 8-inch wall a I2-inch wall, a I6-inch wall, pEaa 24-inch wall. whether he was laying to a line and filling in behind his. own work or whether he was lay ing to line and someone else was filling in behind him, whether he was laying face brick or building a dead wall The same man might lay I,soo or I,Soo bricks one day and lay Aoo the next day and work harder on the 400 face bricks pointed mortar, than he did on the I,5oo bricks.
 "In other words, without some sort of description of the work ,eoo bricks is not the unit of brickfayer' 's,.efic- iency."