OPERATING an automatic machine requires no more than average manual dexterity and ordinary intelligence. In some cases, where the materials in process are heavy, it requires considerable strength and, where several machines are grouped in one man's care, considerable agility. If the operative is willing to trust the company to figure his pay, without checking up in his own interest, no book knowledge is necessary. Simple arithmetic and ability to sign one's name are the top intellectual requirements. Most manufacturers, however, prefer to have their employees read, write, and understand English, though this knowledge is by no means necessary. Consequently, many companies provide instruction in English for immigrants. In general, the ordinary public-school instruction, up to and including the eighth grade, gives a youth all

I

the mental furnishing he needs to function efficiently in automatic production. Considered strictly as an economic being, he could get along with less. When we come to the salaried workers, the so-called white-collar group, we find public education reinforcing the leveling tendency in those branches, just as automatic machinery does in the mills.

Thus far we have considered the automatic machine as leveling wages and distributing labor between farm and factory, home and the mill. In much the same way, the spreading use of automatic machinery tends to level wages in all plants so equipped, though hindered at many points by special conditions and special labor contracts. Certain automatic machines are widely scattered, and can be found in every industrial centre. Many others present family likenesses. Even the greenest of green

workers needs but short tutelage at his assigned machine; while the man who knows how much or rather how little is expected of him, can shake down quickly into efficient production. As was said in an earlier article, the per capita cost of labor turnover on the 1920 basis of pay ranged from $25 to $100 per man in the more efficiently organized automobile plants, this cost including the pay of the novitiate and his teacher, the overhead on machine, and allowance for spoiled work. This verifies the evidence presented by a survey of certain large allied plants, to the effect that 70 per cent of the employees could be fitted into their jobs in three days or less. This means that a worker can shift from one line of production to another without grave loss of time. He may be a woodcutter or harvest-hand this month, and a producer of automobile parts the next. If of a roving disposition, in a single year he may can salmon on the Pacific coast, pour cement on an irrigation dam in Idaho, mill flour in Minnesota, cut pearl buttons in Iowa, mould iron in Ohio, weave silk in Jersey, or make rubber tires in New England. The outcome of such easy transitions must be a highly efficient distribution of labor-power on the one hand, and, on the other, a progressive leveling of wages as among all automatized industries. "The old trade demarcations,' says Mr. E. F. Lloyd, 'have largely ceased to exist, and with their passing the old differences of pay have correspondingly declined.'

This leveling tendency, moreover, is no respecter of sex. Since women can tend many automatic tools as well as men, it follows that the wages of the two sexes must draw together. They may never reach uniformity, because many women view jobs as temporary stopgaps on the road to marriage, and this handicaps them as yet in the eyes of many employers. This, and kindred

non-economic considerations, may affect the result; but they cannot stop the drift toward equality of wage. It is no unusual thing, even now, to find a young wife earning as much as, or more than, her husband. As time goes on, this will become too common to command notice.

Likewise, automatic machinery tends to break down the former disparity of wage as between age and youth. Children of twelve can tend many automatic machines as competently as adults. Youths, in fact, approach their highest wage during the very years in which the boys of a generation ago were earning less than living wages as apprentices. The years from eighteen to twenty-five are the most gainful for the 'machinate mammal.'

The leveling proceeds with ruthless disregard for race or nationality. While a knowledge of the native tongue may be desirable, it is by no means essential. Witness the widespread employment on automatic machines of our newly arrived immigrants, their earning on a parity with native-born products of our public schools. Notwithstanding that the color line rarely gives the negro a chance at automatics, the black populations of our northern industrial cities increased faster than the white populations from 1910 to 1920. Bringing black labor north became a highly organized enterprise. The pay of negroes, generally speaking, maintained a parity with white labor on the same kind of work; and while blacks are not often put on machines, there is no doubt that many blacks can fill the requirements of machine attendance. Whether they can stand the steady grind as well as whites, or whether the color line is justifiably drawn at the machine, are moot points, reserved for future discussion. But the general effect of the automatizing process has been to bring the average wages of the two races closer together, not only in the industrial

cities, but to an even greater extent in those sections where the black does most of the field-work. Increased cotton-picking costs and increased wheatgrowing costs both resulted from the drain that automatic production put upon rural labor-supplies.

Automatic machines in offices affect the white-collar group in industry precisely as shop-workers are affected. With adding machines and other mechanisms, and standardized office system, need for special skill is decreasing among office-workers. The old-fashioned bookkeeper, the aristocrat of fin-de-siècle offices, is fast becoming as obsolete a type as the old-fashioned mechanic, the one-time aristocrat of the shops. Stenographic skill is subject to the competition of the phonograph; the typist is entering into competition with the duplicating typewriter. Meanwhile, public schools and business colleges are producing an abundance of persons sufficiently educated for the simplified office tasks. In addition, the higher social status enjoyed by such workers can be depended upon to furnish surplus labor for such activities in ordinary times, with the result that we pay practically the same rate to washerwomen and typists; also to cooks and stenographers, when board-and-lodging costs are considered. These influences tended to bring office-work down to the wage-level of factory-work before the war; as office-workers began to go over into the ranks of factory-workers, owing to war-wage rates in the factories, office wages began to rise. From this on, owing to the fact that labor can flow from one group to the other more easily than ever before, disparity of wage between the two groups will tend to correct itself promptly.

Transferring the vital function of production from the operative to the machine involves the taking away of skill from the rank and file and concentrat

ing it in the directing and organizing end of industry. The heats of competition, playing through machine improvements, evaporate skill from the lower reaches of industry, and distill it in the upper reaches. Fewer producers need skill; but those few require much longer training and more highly intensified. mental powers. It is up to them, not only to design, build, place, and adapt machines to involved tasks, but also to work out systems under which the production of those machines can be coördinated and the produce distributed.

II

To fit an automatic machine for its production-cycle requires high skill in tool-designing and making. Head and hand must work together; jigs and dies must be of the utmost precision. The number of skilled workmen required for this task is small compared to the whole number of industrial employees; but the group is of key importance. In the past, these men were trained under the apprentice system; but that system being in decline, industrial executives are greatly concerned for the future supply of such craftsmen. They look to public education to guard against a famine of skilled artisans; and such is their influence that they are not likely to look in vain. The call of industry has been answered already by the establishment of technical high schools and colleges in many industrial cities, as well as by the erection of private tradeschools. In desperation some employers have established their own tradeschools; but the outlook is that public education, thus challenged, will take up the burden of providing industry with skilled mechanics. Once adequate facilities are provided, we may look with assurance for the greater mental interest attaching to that work to provide candidates in abundance, and so in

crease the number of qualified men to the point where the pay will approach that of the machine-tender-always being enough more, presumably, to make up for the time and cost of training.

The next layer in the skill compartment contains technical experts, shoporganizers, and salesmen. The third layer includes the executives. It is in these two layers that the thought-processes of modern industry centre; and the demands for special knowledge are such that the personnel must be far better equipped than their predecessors in the old régime. In the swift expansion of automatized industry they have been forced further and further afield for labor and materials on the one hand, and for markets on the other hand. They have been required to finance, not only the inflow of men and machines, but also the outflow of goods; a task so vast and compelling that it has brought into being a distinct adaptation of the banking function to industrial needs. In a very real sense bankers are the aristocrats of modern industry, sitting apart from the actual processes of production and distribution, but furnishing the lifeblood of capital, and through that power exercising a genuine, and usually salutary, control. How are these thought-men of industry going to be affected by these leveling forces at work in modern society? Are they going to be leveled economically by the same forces which brought them such large rewards? Of late years, in the era of industrial expansion, they have commanded large salaries. What is likely to happen to them now that the wheels of industry are slowing down?

So far as the technical experts chiefly chemists and engineers are concerned, the situation is fairly clear. They are being turned out in such numbers by colleges and universities that, except in sudden bursts of industrial expansion, the supply tends to

outrun the demand. There is no wide rift between the pay of a Bachelor of Science, just out of college, and the pay of a factory operative. A city engineering department can hire draughtsmen about as cheaply as common laborers. All institutions of higher learning are growing in attendance, particularly in the technical branches. Also, the training tends to become more thorough, hence more productive of men fitted to move in the highest circles of industrial production. From all indications, universities and colleges are as apt to flood the market with engineers and chemists as the mothers of the country are to flood it with unskilled labor. Public education, therefore, tends to level toward the general average the pay for such service.

Salesmanship is similarly affected. The personal element does not play the large part it did in disposing of goods. The influence of advertising is to create a market condition in which the salesman becomes more and more an 'order-taker,' disposing of standardized, guaranteed goods at prices and on terms set by his superiors in the organization. As dickering is thrust out of the sales equation, the personal shrewdness of the salesman counts for less and less. His efficiency comes to depend less upon native traits and more upon what can be taught him. Salesmen of the old school were born, not made; but salesmen of the new school can be made out of any normally aggressive publicschool product. Schools for salesmanship, established here and there, are likely to succeed. In general, the process of distributing goods tends to become more scientific and less personal; and as that change proceeds, the humbler members of the sales-organization become less important, and more candidates are available. The net result is that the salesman's wage tends toward the common wage-level. The retail

sales-clerk, male or female, earns no more than he or she could earn in a factory. The small retail grocer, whose chief function is that of taking orders, complains because he is being run out of business by a chain store, whose manager is frankly an order-taker, and earns, usually, no more than the average wage of the community. His employer, safeguarded by the cash register and an office system imposing a close check, finds it unnecessary to pay a bonus for character and honesty. The traveling salesman is not the bold, free man of other days; he covers more territory than the 'drummer' of twenty years ago, but he does not have equal responsibility. The tendency, all along the line, is for salesmen's wages to keep in closer touch with the wage-level in the producing end of the business.

III

The situation as respects employers is even more difficult to analyze, because executive ability is so largely applied native force, energy, will-power. Executives, up to date, have been largely self-trained. However, of late, the universities and colleges, recognizing that industrial executives are the most powerful figures in an industrial civilization, have taken steps to train men for these posts. Hence their schools of finance and commerce; hence their courses in business practice; hence the announcements that the universities must train 'for life.' If the educational system makes good on this programme, it is evident that executive salaries must fall. They have always been higher here than abroad. Foreign managers are content with less pay and more prestige. Already the trend is downward. In practically every industrial receivership, the receiver's first step has been to reduce executive salaries. This leveling down is matched by

an equally significant recent leveling up in the salaries of minor executives, who were left behind in the war raises for the rank and file, by means of which the laborer, in many cases, came to earn more than the man from whom he took his orders directly. The Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, some months ago raised all its operating officials below the grade of superintendent, while the salaries of the higher executives were not raised.

Consideration of executive salaries, from this standpoint of wage-leveling, is complicated by the fact that many executives play a dual rôle in industry. They are heavy stockholders as well as managers of other persons' capital. Some managers, in fact, own majority interests in the corporations they captain; the corporation, then, is actually the lengthened shadow of the man and none too lengthened at that. In such cases, managers draw as salaries part of the profits which otherwise would be apportioned as dividends, since competition for leadership does not enter into the equation. This practice has been accelerated by the excessprofits tax.

This dual relationship of the executive to his job seems, however, to be a passing phase. As business institutions age and expand, they tend to divide the functions of management and ownership. Personal enthusiasm and vigor start business projects, but they proceed toward coöperation under the corporate form, with increasing stress upon order and system. Those which survive several generations usually are found operating under other leadership than that of the owners. Accident of birth may produce owners; but it cannot be depended upon to produce those leaders who must be found if the property is to flourish under competition. Few of our younger captains of industry own dominant