The Omaha guide., 1945-10-06
Released by Calvin's News Service

speaking OF null employment" and sixty mill
ion jobs, down in Memphis, Tennessee, the Inter
national Harvester Company is rushing to complet-
ion a big new plant for the production of mechanic
al cotton pickers. Within a year or two, the plant
will be in mass production. I do not yet know
what the size of the labor force will be, but the plant
will probably employ many thousands. And it
Will use up raw materials that represent the prod
uct of an additional few thousands.
/ can almost hear the economic myth-peddler
saying: CSee! Technology doesn't cause unemploy-
ment. Technology MAKES jobsP'
There is no gainsaying that the mechanical pick
er WILL make Jobs for a few thousands. But
what it is going to do to the jobs in the cotton fields
is what the atom bomb did to the population of
Hiroshima. BY a conservative estimate, 100000
workers whose main source Of livelihood is hOeing
and picking cotton will be displaced by this single
invention alone. And some have put the figure as
high as 100000. The Department of Agriculture
warns that this is not something coming in the re
mote future. 1t will probably start on a large
scale next year and not later than 1947. Within
five to ten years cotton picking will be as mechanic
ed as the IT,. s. Cavalry.
The mechanical picker will conquer the last great
stand of hand labor for the reason that it can pick a
bale of cotton for a fraction of the cost of hand
picking. Economists of the Clayton-Anderson
Company say the mechanical picker will do the job
for 1926 a bale, including 1904 in depreciation on
the machine. AT preWar wage rates, it cost $l4 to
pick a bale by hand, and at current wage rates, $35.
In these figures any one can read the doom of the
field hand.
DO people who casually assure us Of full employ
ment' under capitalism consider developments like
this? They do not! Even men like Henry Wallace
repeat the nonsense that increased productivity
per worker is the way to more jobs and higher wag-
es. Yet, any one who thinks two minutes knows
that the only reason new machines are installed is
to displace labor, and that, when workers are dis
placed and glut the labor market, the price of labor
power (Wages) goes down.
Virtually all the workers to be blitzed by the
mechanical picker are Negroes, and the remainder
Gin the Southwest are mostly Americans of Next
can descent. Precious few of these will get Jobs
running the new machines. Miraculously, cotton
picking will become a "white" job, and white work
ers will get the few jobs it provides. This is al
ways the case when dirty and toilsome jobs are
mechanical. Instead Of a blessing, the mechanical
picker will bring a blight to the South Cor to that
part Of the South that performs useful labor that
will make even the boil weevil seem b~eneficent by
comparison.
The tendency is marked even among the advo-
Gates of full employment" to put these dire events
to-come out Of mind. Indeed, in the speeches and
articles and books OF those who claim unemploy-
ment can be solved within the present system, there
is scarcely a word on the future effects Of technol-
ogy on employment. The result is that they are
preparing a plan as madeSuate IN holding back the
flood of peacetime unemployment as a sand dyke
would be in holding back the Overlooking Missis-
sippi.
In his great work, "Capital'. Karl Marx quotes
John Stuart Mill as saying: 1T is questionable if
all the mechanical inventions yet made have light
ened the days toll of any human being" In his
comment on this, Marx adds: Mills should have
said, of any human being not fed by other peoples
labor, for without doubt, machinery has greatly
increased the number of wen-to-do idlers." And
so it has. For the workers, instead Of being a bless
ing, it has been a curse. Privately owned. it has
been used by its owners as E highwayman uses his
gun-to extract a tribute from their victims.
Surely, it is plain that society cannot 60 on forev-
er with this kind Of progress. It is progressive
ness which, like that implicit in the atom bomb,
'progresses'' from catastrophe to catastrophe.
Surely, it is plain that the great mechanical devices,
so big with the promise of abundance for all, must
become the collective property of the workers who
run them.
If this is not plain now, / think it safe to say that
for millions of workers the mechanical picker will
make it so.