United States or Iceland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
All occupation returns not contained in the printed list will be classified and punched later by a special force of clerks. Holes punched for those out of work and the number of weeks unemployed are all easy. At the top of the last column, too, 'Emp' means Employer, 'W' Wage Earner, while 'OA' means working on his or her own account, and 'Un' is for Unemployed."
Most of them are under the merit system, which is a guaranty of their intelligence, and the efficiency of their service is a demonstration of their loyalty. The Federal Government should continue to set a good example for all other employers. In the industries the condition of the wage earner has steadily improved. The 12-hour day is almost entirely unknown. Skilled labor is well compensated.
At the same time, it has all but abandoned the old demagogic talk about representing the citizen as consumer against the citizen as producer. Indeed, the protection of the ultimate consumer against monopolies is clearly made incidental to the protection of the small capitalist consumer-producer. The wage earner consumes few products of the Steel Trust, the farmer and small manufacturers, many.
But the decisive impulse came from the nation-wide democratic upheaval led by Andrew Jackson, for which the poorer classes in the cities displayed no less enthusiasm than the agricultural West. To the wage earner this outburst of democratic fervor offered an opportunity to try out his recently acquired franchise.
All these developments have greatly lessened the chances of the ordinary wage earner for any position of ownership or control. They have tended to separate the wage earners from the groups controlling industry; they have taken away in a large measure the inspiration which work receives from hopes of steady advancement.
If Congress cannot constitutionally impair the right of private property, or take it without compensation, it cannot constitutionally, legalize the perpetration of such acts, by others, nor protect those who commit them. Does the power to rob a man of his earnings, rob the earner of his right to them?
But there was a drought, and the millers, depending on water to drive their mills, could not produce flour. There had been a sudden curtailment of Court and aristocratic expenditure, so that the Parisian wage earner was unemployed. The emigration had thrown many retainers out of their places.
But the increase that occurs through more efficient methods in productive enterprise is not a real increase; it does not relatively affect the social or economic position of the wage earner. In the last analysis, the wage return is not an educator's criterion, in spite of the pragmatic recommendation of the Cleveland Survey.
He counted out into Fuzzy's hand ten ten-dollar bills; then dropped his eye upon the door, transferred it to James, its custodian, indicated the obnoxious earner of the reward with the other, and allowed his pumps to waft him away to secretarial regions. James gathered Fuzzy with his own commanding optic and swept him as far as the front door.
It would be a brave man who would undertake to convince the twentieth century adult wage earner, involved in modern methods of machine production, that his poverty is less in his possession of wealth than in his growth and in his creative opportunity. The industrial changes which the labor movement proposes to make are on the side of a better distribution of goods.
Word Of The Day