risen, while the pay of the engineers, who are mostly "English-speaking," has not come up to the 1880 level. A summary of the figures is given in Table 119 next below.' TABLE 119. DAILY WAGES OF EMPLOYEES IN STEEL COMPANY NO. 1, 1880-1908. As stated, the wage statistics of the Immigration Commission do not include rolling mills. From data published by the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics it appears that the average wages of laborers in rolling mills increased, from 1884 to 1902, 50 per cent, as shown in Table 120: TABLE 120. COMPARATIVE wages of laboRERS IN ROLLING MILLS, OHIO, 1884-1902. An intelligent comparison of the wages of iron and steel workers at present and in the period preceding the immigra • For details of the scale, see Appendix, Table XXV. • Reports of the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1885, p. 187; 1903, p. tion of Southern and Eastern Europeans must take into consideration the revolution in technical methods which has occurred in the iron and steel industry during the intervening years. Prior to 1890, less than one half of all pig iron produced was made into steel; in 1909 all but 7 per cent of the pig iron reached the market as steel. Until 1890 the manufacture of iron other than steel exhibited a rapid growth; from 1880 to 1890 its output doubled. Since the latter year, however, it began to decline; from 5,000,000 tons in 1890 it dropped to about 1,800,000 tons in 1909. The majority of the men who had acquired skill in the iron mills found their occupations gone. Judged by the tonnage of pig iron, the change must have affected as many iron workers as there had been employed in all the mills in 1887. At the same time the production of steel has increased sixfold since 1890. This marvelous growth was made possible only by the adoption of new methods of steel-making. All these changes necessitated a thorough readjustment of the laboring forces. The transformation is well described in the following excerpts from Mr. Fitch's study of The Steel Workers: Through the revolutionary changes in method, machinery has displaced men to a remarkable extent. The proportion of skilled steel workers needed for the operation of a plant has decreased. At the same time, the large companies have so increased their capacity that they are employing more men than ever before, until to-day 60 per cent of the men employed in the steel industry are unskilled, and that 60 per cent is greater in numbers than the total working force twenty years ago. In no part of the steel manufacture have inventions and improvements had such an effect upon working conditions as in the rolling mills. Twenty years ago these mills were alive with men. Today you will find large numbers of men in the guide and merchant mills, but at the blooming mills, the plate mills, and the structural and rail mills, you have to look sharply not to miss them entirely. These mills have become largely automatic. The two improvements that have contributed most to the cutting-down of the laboring force are the electric crane and the movable roll tables. . . . The electric crane ... 'Computed from Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1911, p. 710. operates over the whole length of the mill. Heavy material, that formerly a dozen moved with difficulty, is now picked up and moved easily by two men, working with a crane. Roll changing has become an easier and swifter process through the aid of the crane, and practically all the heavy lifting and carrying within the mill is thus accomplished by electric power. . . As in the case of blast furnace improvements, the effect has been to reduce the number of men employed. . . . This tendency to make processes automatic has resulted not only in a lessened cost with an increased tonnage, but it has also reinforced the control of the employers over their men. When the roll tables were introduced, they threw many roughers and catchers out of employment; beyond that, they lessened the importance to the employers of the men remaining. Men can learn to pull levers more easily than they can reach the skilled mastery of a position where the greatest dependence is on the man and the least on the machine. Accordingly this development has lessened the value to the employer of all the men in a plant, and at the same time has made the job of every man, skilled and unskilled, to a greater or less degree insecure. . . . The aim to-day seems to be to make the whole process as mechanical as possible. Fifteen or twenty years ago a large proportion of the employees in any steel plant were skilled men. The percentage of the highly skilled has steadily grown less, and the percentage of the unskilled has as steadily increased. The plants of the Carnegie Steel Company in Allegheny County employ in seasons of prosperity an aggregate of over 23,000 men. Of these about 17 per cent are skilled, 21 per cent semi-skilled, and 62 per cent unskilled, according to the classification employed by the company.1 Taking the classification of Table 118 as a standard of comparison, we find that in 1884 more than one third of all men employed in rolling mills were skilled, whereas by 1907 their proportion had shrunk to 17 per cent. Had there been no expansion in the steel industry, more than one half of the skilled men employed in 1884 would have been reduced to the semi-skilled grade. But as the growth of production outran the progress of labor-saving methods and machinery, the skilled and semi-skilled men who were displaced from one department were absorbed in others, and still there were openings in the higher grades which were filled by promotion from the ranks of the older unskilled men. Of course the whole trend of the technical progress 1 Fitch, loc. cit., pp. 3-4, 55-56, 139–141. in the steel industry being toward elimination of human skill, the advancement of the minority to skilled and semiskilled positions depended upon the employment of everincreasing numbers of unskilled laborers. For reasons explained in Chapter VIII., English, Irish, and German immigration began to fall off at just about the time that the steel industry began to expand so rapidly and at the same time to introduce the automatic processes. This created a tremendous market for unskilled labor just as the field of immigration was shifting from Northwestern to Southeastern Europe. Slavs coming to America to perform the unskilled manual labor, and finding it in the steel industry, sent for their relatives and neighbors. These automatic accretions, through letters and friends returning to the old country and spreading the tidings of where work is to be had, are at once the most natural and most widespread factors in mobilizing an immigrant labor force.1 Mr. Fitch is careful to note that "the newer immigrants are not working for less pay for a day's rough work than the races they replaced. The money wages paid for common labor in the Pittsburgh steel mills have been going up during the period referred to." It is clear that the recent immigrants were not "brought" to this country to undercut the wages of the older employees. The Irish were not driven out of the blast furnaces by a fresh immigration with lower standards of living [says Mr. Fitch further]; rather the conditions in the industry—the twelve-hour day, the days and the weeks without a day of rest, the twenty-four-hour shift—made the life intolerable. They could make as good a living working fewer hours a day, and only six days in the week, in other positions and in other industries. So the Irish worker went out and the Slav came in.' The effect of these readjustments on the distribution of the working force by race and occupation in the Pittsburgh district can be seen from Table 131. The average proportion of Southern and Eastern Europeans among the iron and steel workers, according to the investigations of the Immigration Commission, was 44.5 • Ibid., pp. 142–143. • Fitch, loc. cit., p. 143. 3 Ibid., p. 146. |