Lapas attēli
PDF
ePub

quoted above from the abstract of the reports on immigrants in manufacturing and mining, to the effect that "the more recent immigrant employees from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia . . . have been a constant menace to the labor organizations, and have been directly and indirectly instrumental in weakening the unions and threatening their disruption."

Considering:

(1) That the unskilled operatives have at no time been organized;

(2) That the recent immigrants seldom advance to the skilled crafts;

(3) That when they do advance to skilled occupations they either join the unions of their crafts or stand by the unions though not affiliated with them;

(4) That with the machinery heretofore in use there has been no room for competition between organized skilled operatives and unorganized immigrant unskilled laborers;

(5) That in past strikes the recent immigrants have stood by the strikers and have never acted as strike-breakers:

It is evident that the presence of recent immigrants has been no hindrance to union activity. The failure of the unions to secure better terms from the mill corporations than they did must therefore be due to other causes than immigration.

The real cause of low wages in the cotton mills of New England is the competition of the Southern cotton mills. The subject is only hinted at in the report of the Immigration Commission. No immigrants being employed in the Southern mills, the latter were apparently considered beyond the scope of the Commission's investigation. A

Reports of the Immigration Commission, p. 124. Unfortunately, the full report on cotton goods manufacturing has been printed only as a Senate document and is accessible to a very limited number of readers, whereas the misleading conclusions of the abstract on immigration in manufacturing and mining have received wide circulation through the free mailing list of the Commission.

thorough discussion of the subject is found in the report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics for 1906.

Comparing labor conditions in New England and Southern mills, the Massachusetts report says, by inference, that when the sons and daughters of the farmers of the surrounding country were replaced in the Northern mills by foreigners, strikes and lockouts followed, and the doors were opened to the trade unions, with the result that hours of labor were reduced, wages were increased, and child labor was restricted. The development of the cotton manufacturing industry in the South, with its natural advantages and "cheap labor," has made successful competition impossible for Massachusetts mills, unless Massachusetts will "retrograde and increase its hours of labor, reduce its wages, and employ its children to meet the South in a battle on its own ground."2

The "cheap labor" of the Southern cotton mills is the labor of the native white of native stock, who constitute 99 per cent of all cotton-mill operatives in North Carolina, 97 per cent in Georgia and Alabama.3 The average yearly earnings of the Southern operatives compared as follows with those of the New England operatives, many of whom were Southern and Eastern European, Armenian, and Syrian immigrants:

“When the native stock is all employed, the South must look to the immigrant, and then will come the test of her ability to withstand the enactment of just labor laws. She will be compelled to readjust her hours of labor, increase her wages, discharge her child labor, and open her doors to the trade union. She will go through the same experience as the North. The North's first operatives were the sons and daughters of the native farmers round about, but the grandchildren would not follow in their parents' footsteps, preferring to go into other business. This the South is finding to be the case with the children they are attempting to educate, and foreigners must soon be taken to replace them. Then will come a repetition of the experience of the Northern mills. Strikes and lockouts will follow." Thirty-Sixth Annual Report Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor (1906), Part II: Cotton Manufactures in Massachusetts and the Southern States, p. 102.

2 Ibid., p. 106.

Occupations at the XII. Census, Table 41 (computed).

TABLE 114.

AVERAGE YEARLY EARNINGS OF COTTON-MILL OPERATIVES, BY SEX AND AGE IN THE PRINCIPAL STATES, 1904.1

[blocks in formation]

As can be seen from the preceding table the average earnings of adult men in South Carolina are only slightly above the average earnings of children in Massachusetts; the highest average earnings of adult men in the Southern mills are much below the average earnings of women employed in the Northern mills. This is a reversal of the usual relation between men's and women's wages. It is this competition of the cheap American labor of the Southern mills that keeps down the wages of the Southern and Eastern European, Armenian, and Syrian immigrants employed in the cotton mills of the North.

1 Census of Manufactures, 1905, vol. i., Table 5, p. 188.

CHAPTER XIX

THE

THE WOOLEN MILLS

HE recent strike in the woolen mills of Lawrence has forcibly drawn public attention to the condition of labor in the woolen industry. It developed in the hearings held before the Committee of the House of Representatives, and through investigations made by leading magazine writers and social workers, that in this industry, protected from foreign competition by the tariff and from domestic competition by a high degree of centralization, the wages of married men were insufficient for the support of their families. The fact that the strikers were mostly recent immigrants diverted the discussion from the issues of the strike to the subject of immigration. It was readily believed that they had been "imported" because of their low standard of living, for the express purpose of reducing the wages of native American and other English-speaking operatives. Professor Lauck, author of the report of the Immigration Commission on "Immigrants in Industries," writing in the North American Review on the Lawrence strike, claimed that

the American mill hand. . . because of his inability to work under the same conditions and at the same wages as the recent immigrant, has been forced to leave the woolen-goods manufacturing industry.'

It has been taken as a self-evident truth that the wages of the recent immigrants were low because they lived in con

'W. Jett Lauck: "The Lesson from Lawrence," North American Review, May, 1912, p. 664.

gested quarters, and because they were underfed and poorly clad. There has accordingly been little disposition among people usually friendly to labor to waste sympathy upon men and women who were "willing" to deny themselves the barest necessities of life for the mere privilege of working in the mills. "The lesson from Lawrence" is to these good people that the solution of the labor problem is in keeping out the foreign laborer. As usual in all arguments inspired by this theory, no regard is paid to historical perspective.

The American operative was not "forced to leave the woolen-goods manufacturing industry" by the coming of the recent immigrants, because he had left it long before. According to the census of 1880, there were among the 10,395 operatives of the cotton and woolen mills of Lawrence only 4111 native Americans, i. e., only 40 per cent, including persons of native and of foreign parentage. The majority were immigrants from Ireland, Great Britain, and Canada, with a sprinkling of Germans (4 per cent). The immigrants from all other countries numbered I per cent of all operatives. Thus, if the prevalence of immigrants among the operatives be the result of the "forcing out" of native Americans, it is clear that they were forced out by English-speaking immigrants.

Even as recently as 1900 the immigrants from Italy, Russia, Poland, and Austria-Hungary and their Americanborn children, employed in the woolen and worsted mills of Lawrence, numbered only 721 persons of both sexes, i. e., 10 per cent of all operatives, whereas the total number of native Americans of native parentage did not exceed 374, i. e., 5.2 per cent of the total force. If it be true that all but this little remnant of American operatives had been "forced out" of the mills, is there any reason to attribute their ousting to the pressure of the 10 per cent made up of "recent immigrants" rather than to that of the 85 per cent

I

2

Population, X. Census, Table XXXVI., p. 882.

1 Occupations at the XII. Census Table 43.

« iepriekšējāTurpināt »