Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Volume 90-92 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 Excerpt: ...wages and the steadily ebbing water-line of working hours have left the sands of the labor world strewn with the flotsam and jetsam of past employment traditions, and the wreckage of even our basic manufactories. As a nation consuming more than it is willing to produce, and drifting on the rocks of spending more than it is ready to earn, America is today concerned with no more vital problem than that of the relation of the worker to his work. The line that depicts per capita production on the factory chart, however, strikes its average in relation to pay-roll and hours irrespective of questions of sex or of age. The position of women in industry today differs not one jot from that of men, in that in the hands of both rests the solution of the modern economic riddle of how the streams of adequate wages and bettered industrial conditions shall be fed from a dwindling spring of national productive capacity. Did The War Revolutionize IndusTrial Conditions? While the social changes of the brief war-span must be measured by generations rather than years, we shall do well to discard the fallacy that the world conflict has revolutionized the relation of employer and employee. The search light of emergency may create a new perspective, and transform the doubtful into the obvious; but a reversal of the familiar relations of light and shade in the scene about us can alter nothing, in reality, except the viewpoint of the spectator. Yet no phrase of the war was more readily accepted by the public than that declaring that our industries were confronted by wholly new conditions. Reduced to its last analysis, the limelight of publicity and the headlines of the press featured the fact that women were earning a living wage on the lathe of the machine-shop, in the laboratory ...