OCR Text |
Show Only 21 Per Cent of Nation's Workers Employed on Farms Machines an Aid in Creating; Jobs MOST difficult problem of the discussions about technological unemployment the replacement of men by machines is to separate the short from the long time point of view. It is difficult to argue with a man who has lost his job because be-cause the company he worked for has installed one machine which does his work and that of nine of his fellow workmen. Maybe It takes one man to operate the machine so nine men are out of a Job unless they can make the transition to a new field of endeavor. That example, ever being duplicated dupli-cated throughout American industry in a myriad of ways, is the short scale view. It is hard on the Individual Indi-vidual but In the long run may prove beneficial to the nation. Men Versus Machines. The , new book, "Machinery, Employment Em-ployment and Purchasing Power" just published by the National Industrial In-dustrial Conference" Board, concedes the problem of the short scale replacement re-placement of men by machines but rightly emphasizes also the picture of machines in Industry over the longer period say CO years when the recent economic unpleasantness may reasonably be a thing of the past and half forgotten. In the 50 years from 1S79 to 1029, It Is pointed out, IS new manufacturing manufac-turing industries came into existence exist-ence and accounted for an IS per cent Increase in total employment. During the same years the number of people employed per million of population in new manufacturing Industries increased 40 per cent. First place among the new industries indus-tries as an employer of labor was the automobile industry. Next came the electrical machinery Industry. Others include: rubber tires and inner in-ner tubes, manufacture of gasoline, rayon and allied products, manufactured manufac-tured Ice, aluminum manufacture, typewriters and parts, cash registers regis-ters and adding machines, and the whole aircraft Industry. Significant in the employment problem, the conference board's study shows, Is that in the last 50 years agriculture has changed from an occupation which employed half the working population of the nation na-tion to one which employs only 21 per cent of the workers. Effects of New Industries. Manufacturing in the same 50 years rose from the place where It employed 21 per cent of the working work-ing population to where It now absorbs ab-sorbs 29 per cent. This increase name in snlte of the continual re placement of men by machines. Trade, transportation and the service industries showed the largest larg-est transition in the 50 years, changing from the place where they absorbed only 10"'ner cent of the workers to the stage where they now employ 20 per cent. Domestic service and the so-called professional service both showed a 3 per cent employment gain In the same period. Domestic help jumped from 10 to 13 per cent of the working work-ing population, while the professional profession-al workers rose from 3 to 6 per cent. |