Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/91

 will form an even stronger iron ring, which it will be impossible to break by purely union methods.

However important, and indeed indispensable, the unions have been and will remain, we need not expect that they can again so mightily advance the proletariat by purely economic methods as they were able to do during the last dozen years. We may even need to reckon with the possibility that their opponents will gain sufficient power to gradually force them back.

It is worthy of notice that even during the last years of prosperity, while industry was still in full swing, and was even complaining of a lack of labor power, that the workers were no longer able to raise their real wages—that is, their wages as measured not in money, but in the necessaries of life. This has been proven by private investigations in various sections of the workers in Germany. In America we have an official recognition of this fact for the whole laboring class.

The labor bureau at Washington has, since 1890, undertaken each year to investigate the condition of the workers in a number of establishments of the most important branches of industry in the United States. In recent years there were 4,169 factories and work places in which the height of wages, the hours of labor, as well as the domestic budgets of the laborers were investigated, together with the form of their consumption and the prices of the necessaries of life. The figures thus obtained were then compared to show the improvement or deterioration in the condition of the workers.

For each individual article the average of the figures from 1890–99 was taken as 100. The number 101, therefore, indicated an improvement of one per cent as compared with the years 1890–99; the number 99, in the same way, indicated a deterioration of one per cent.