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Updated: June 3, 2025
But because the competition of seamstresses, tailors, shirt- finishers, fur-sewers, &c., is conducted more quietly and privately, it is not less intense, not less miserable, and not less degrading. This struggle for life in the shape of work for bare subsistence wages, is the true logical and necessary outcome of free competition among an over supply of low-skilled labourers.
But the Unions of low-skilled workers will have been organized with the view of monopolizing all the low- skilled work which the present needs of the community require to be done. How then will the public provide low-skilled work for the unemployed? One of two courses seems inevitable.
It must be remembered that we have been concerned with what is only a portion of the great industrial movement of to-day. Perhaps it may serve to make the industrial position of the poor low-skilled workers more distinct if we attempt to set this portion in its true relation to the larger Labour Problem, by giving a brief outline of the size and relation of the main industrial forces of the day.
If an Alien law is passed, it will bring both logically and historically in its wake such protective measures as will constitute a reversal of our present Free Trade policy. Whether such new and hazardous changes in our national policy are likely to be made, depends in large measure upon the success of other schemes for treating the condition of over-supply of low-skilled labour.
Productive co-operation is successful at present only in rare cases among skilled workmen of exceptional morale and education. It is impossible that it should be practised by low-skilled, low-waged workers, under industrial conditions like those of to-day.
The southern agricultural labourer and the whole body of low-skilled workers were probably in most respects as well off a century and a half ago as they are to-day. The great fall of prices, due to cheapening of production and of transport during the last twenty years, benefits the poor far less than the rich.
The most intelligent social reformers are naturally directing their attention to the question, how to drain these lowlands of labour of the superfluous supply, or in other words to keep down the population of the low-skilled working class. Among the many population drainage schemes, the following deserve close attention Checks on growth of population.
If one by one all the avenues of regular low-skilled labour are closed by securing a practical monopoly of this and that work for the members of a Union, the superfluous body of labourers will be driven more and more to depend on irregular jobs, and forced more and more into concentrated masses of city dwellers, will present an ever-growing difficulty and danger to national order and national health.
Consideration of the general progress of the working-classes has no force to set aside this problem. It seems not unlikely that we are entering on a new phase of the poverty question. The upper strata of low-skilled labour are learning to organize.
Two further proposals for keeping down the supply of low-skilled labour deserve notice, and the more so because they are forcing their way rapidly toward the arena of practical politics. The first is the question of an Alien law limiting or prohibiting the migration of foreign labourers into England.
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