Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Wealth and Income of the American People (1924).pdf/45

Rh The railways of the country, the victims of a weak surrender of the Government to the unions, found themselves almost helpless and under Federal control their situation changed from bad to worse. At the end the Government was employing about 2,300,000 men to do about the same work that 1,800,000 had been doing in 1916.

The workers in mines, metallurgical plants and factories function in more concentrated groups, consequently are more amenable to discipline and control, and for those reasons the impairment in efficiency among them was not so great as among the builders and transportation men. In the latter part of 1920 I had occasion to review what had happened in the zinc smelting industry and reported the following, which may be taken as a fair illustration:

“A safe general deduction from the data is that if the average labor requirement in smelting a ton of blende in 1914 was 2}; man-days, in 1920 it was 214 man-days. The average rate of wages paid zinc smelters increased from 1914 to 1920 by 2 to 2.67 times. The average extraction of zinc in smelting in the United States decreased from 1914 to 1920 at least 2, and maybe 3 per cent. The importance of the last factor will be appreciated by considering that during a large part of this period zinc was worth about $200 per ton.

“The deduction to be drawn from the collection of figures on this subject is simple. The zinc smelters, meaning the workmen, of the United States during the period from 1914 to 1920 received a great increase in their rate of wages, in consideration of which they did less work per man, as reflected by the greater number of man-days required to smelt a ton of ore; and even