Evening star., 1925-08-03
BACKGROUND OF EVENTS
BY PAUL !. COLLINS.

There are some 1900 fewer un-
skilled alien laborerS in the United
States today than there were a year
ago.
Under the new immigration law
we admitted 2S,90S common laborers
in 10 months of the last fiscal year
and 1880 others returned 10 Europe.
The new law permits quotas of 2
per cent Of each nationality already
in this country, based upon the 1890
census, while the previous law gave
per cent OF the 1910 census as
the quota. With the above figures.
there are economists who view with
alarm" the rapid depletion of com
mon laborers," and they prophesy
that soon we shall have none but
Americans to do the dirty work" 4"
Perhaps everybody does not see the
joker in that calamity, for when
cheap men depart, there may not be
so much dirty work" to be done, ac-
cording to the opinion of labor econ
omists in the Department of Labor.
Or, rather, because there is a lessened
| need for common labor" the un-
skilled men depart.
Mr.. Ethelbert Stewart, statiStician
of the Department of Labor, asks:
What has become of the wheelbar-
row? Where is the hod with which
bricks were formerly toted up ladders
to the top of "A tive-story wall, where
bricklayers did all the work.?
Within the last five years there has
been a greater advance in labor-sav-
ing methods than in any previous
five years in the history of America
yet there has been no important
labor saving machine invented within
that period The war necessities of
rapid production set men to planning
for efficiency, such as had never be-
fore been conceived. and such as the
rest of the world does not yet imagine
possible.
Prior to the World War there was
a certain wire factory where the in
gots of iron were piled mountain high
! by alien hunkies." who
carried them upon their shoulders up
long, steep inclines. Then, as the
wire machines needed the stock, other
"hunkies" climbed up to the peak
of the mountain of iron and carried
down a shoulderful at a time. These
common laborerS" received S2.35 a
day, and worked IL hours. When
wages for laborers rose in the war to
S4 and Sc d day, the wire factory
substituted great crane magnet,
which swung over that mountain and
lifted a ton of ingots down to the
machines. AS 1t costs many hundreds
of dollars a day less to use the crane,
the laborers may return to Europe,
where no crane is thought of. That
appears to be one way by which
Americans can do the dirty work -
x X X X
Formerly, in a factory where tin
cans were made ii required so many
wheelbarrows to haul the tin sheets
from one machine to the next in the
consecutive processes of manufac-
ture, that there was hardly floor
space for the wheelers of the barrows
to pass each other Now, by a rear
rangement of the machines in con-
secutive order, with automatic con-
veyors from one process to the next,
sheet of tin enters the first machine
and comes out a finished can, after
passing automatically from machine
to machine, and not one wheelbarrow
or common laborer" is required.
One of the great manufactures of
automobiles formerly boasted that in
the process of making an automobile
the raw material travelled 3h miles;
now the various steps are so CO..
ordinated that the material does not
travel so feet from start to finish.
X x X
Z In 1850 the blast furnaces produced
25 tons of iron per man in year:
today the average is 81 tons per man.
One of the great steel companies of
Pittsburgh recently shut down two
Of its blast furnaces, because. with