Page:Jay Lovestone - Blood and Steel (1923)).djvu/19

 receive yearly millions of dollars in dividends are condemning the workers for refusing to run after a forty-cents-an-hour job in the infernal steel mills.

According to the April, 1923, Employment Bulletin of the Illinois Department of Labor the average weekly wage in the iron and steel industry during April was $27.61. A magnificient sum for a family to live on! Nor should anyone be stunned with terrific amazement at the menacing height to which the steel wage has climbed! This average wage includes the salaries paid skilled and responsible men as well as leaders and common labor.

Again, not even Gary and his Committee, so highly gifted with inventive genius, can find a shred of evidence to disprove the fact that not a single steel plant working on a three-shift plan is experiencing the least bit of labor-shortage. We need but cite the experiences of the Republic Iron and Steel Co., the International Harvester Co., the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co., and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co.

From a letter sent by J. F. Welborn, President of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co., to the Federal Council of Churches we learn that:

"A factor of added interest is the fact that with almost capacity operations at our steel plants during the last few months and employing over 6,000 men, we have experienced no shortage of labor. Our operating officials have frequently expressed the belief that this condition is due, in large part at least, to adoption of the eight-hour shift."

It is a fact and an incontrovertible fact that it is only on the basis of 40 cents an hour and Twelve Hours a day that the Steel Trust is at all confronted with a labor shortage.

Finally, let us turn to the Report of the Federated American Engineering Societies on this question. Said the engineers in their Report entitled "The Twelve Hour Shift in Industry":

"The plants which have adopted the three-shift system and are paying wages a little lower than are paid at corresponding plants working twelve-hour shifts have sufficient labor, both skilled and unskilled."

And in his letter to the Federal Council of Churches, Pres. J. F. Welborn stated that:

"The trend of production per man hour, with unimportant exceptions, has been upward since the adoption of the Eight-Hour Day; and in every department of our steel manufacturing operations, from the blast furnace to the wire mill, our production per man hour is now greater than it was when all of these activities were operating on the twelve hour shift."