The Economic Policy Proposed by American Labor

purchasers. There is no such thing as security so long as the productive power of machinery enables corporate employers to reduce the numbers of human workers, adding yearly and increasingly to that tragedy of modern efficiency, the human scrap heap. No one will seriously challenge the following facts: Volume of production has, since the coming of mass production, gone steadily upward. Numbers of those employed have gone steadily downward. Total volume of wages has gone down, though the wages of those retained in employment have gone up. The result of these trends has been a diminishing mass purchasing power, more and more unable to satisfy its needs or to move by purchase the growing stream of output. Whatever other causes may have contributed, we have unemployment as the natural consequence of a national industrial plant that uses its mechanization to destroy men and women. This cannot continue indefinitely without severe reckoning

Demographic economics · Economics · Labour economics · Economic Theory and Policy