survey by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company showed an unemployment rate of 9.1 per cent. The next table (XVIII) shows the unemployed in September, 1915, classified by sex and duration of unemployment and the corresponding information for the February survey given in parallel columns. The figures give the cumulative number and percentage of wage-earners out of employment each specified number of days. D. The Worker and the New Technology See also Selections 165-170. Some Characteristic Results of the 212. THE HAZARDOUS NATURE OF MODERN INDUSTRY' In the first place, a high degree of hazard inheres in present-day Amethods of production. Modern technology makes use of the most subtle and resistless forces of nature-forces whose powers of destruc tion when they escape control are fully commensurate with their beneficent potency when kept in command. Moreover, these forces operate, not the simple hand tools of other days, but a maze of complicated machinery which the individual workman can neither comprehend nor control, but to the movements of which his own motions must closely conform in rate, range, and direction. Nor is the worker's danger confined to the task in which he is himself engaged, nor to the appliances within his vision. A multitude of separate operations are combined into one comprehensive mechanical process, the successful consummation of which requires the co-operation of thousands of operatives and of countless pieces of apparatus in such close interdependence that a hidden defect of even a minor part, or a momentary lapse of memory or of attention by a single individual may imperil the lives of hundreds. A tower man misinterprets an order, or a brittle rail gives way, and a train loaded with human freight dashes to destruction. A miner tamps his "shot" with slack, and dust explosion wipes out a score of lives. A steel beam yields to the pressure it was calculated to bear, and a rising skyscraper collapses in consequence, burying a small army of workmen in the ruins. In the second place, human nature, inherited from generations that knew not the machine, is imperfectly fitted for the strain put upon it by mechanical industry. Safely to perform their work the Adapted by permission from E. H. Downey, History of Work Accident Indemnity in Iowa, pp. 3-5. (Published by the State Historical Society of Iowa, operatives of a modern mill, mine, or railway should think consistently in terms of those mechanical laws to which alone present-day industrial processes are amenable. They should respond automatically to the most varied mechanical exigencies, and should be as insensible to fatigue and as unvarying in behavior as the machines they operate. Manifestly these are qualities which normal human beings do not possess in anything like the requisite degree. The common man is neither an automaton nor an animated slide-rule. The machine technology, in fact, covers so small a fraction of the life history of mankind that its discipline has not yet produced a mechanically standardized race, even in those communities and classes that are industrially most advanced. And so there is a great number of work injuries due to the "negligence of the injured workman"-due, that is to say, to the shortcomings of human nature as measured by the standards of the mechanician. This maladjustment is aggravated by the never-ceasing extension of machine methods to new fields of industry, and the continued influx of children, women, and untrained peasants into mechanical employments. Accordingly, the proportion of accidents attributable to want of knowledge, skill, strength, or care on the part of operatives appears everywhere to be increasing. There is, then, no prospect that the "carnage of peace" will be terminated, as the carnage of war may be, within the predictable future. An industrial community must face the patent fact that work injuries on a tremendous scale are a permanent feature of modern life. Every mechanical employment has a predictable hazard; of a thousand men who climb to dizzy heights in erecting steel structures a certain number will fall to death, and of a thousand girls who feed metal strips into stamping machines a certain number will have their fingers crushed. So regularly do such injuries occur that every machine-made commodity may be said to have a definite cost in human blood and tears a life for so many tons of coal, a lacerated hand for so many laundered shirts. 213. CAUSES AND VOLUME OF INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENTS1 The number of salary- and wage-earners in the United States may be conservatively estimated for 1913 at 30,760,000 males and 7,200,000 females. This estimate is subject to correction on the From F. L. Hoffman, "Industrial Accident Statistics," Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, No. 157 (March, 1915), pp. 5–6, 145. I GENERAL CAUSES OF COMPENSATED INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENTS, EXPERIENCE OF GERMAN INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT ESTIMATE OF FATAL INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENTS IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1913, BY INDUSTRY GROUPS 1121915 a basis of the census returns of 1910 when this estimate was made. The probable approximate number of fatal industrial accidents among American wage-earners, including both sexes, may be conservatively estimated at 25,000 for the year 1913, and the number of injuries involving a disability of more than four weeks, using the ratio of Austrian experience, at approximately 700,000. This estimate is arrived at by calculating separately the probable accident rates for the more important groups of occupations, of which the foregoing table may be considered typical and representative. 214. SOCIAL LOSS THROUGH ACCIDENTS1 The accident loss for an industrial district can be estimated from the standpoint of social economy. Frederick Hoffman, statistician of the Prudential Insurance Company, estimates that the net economic gain to society from the life of a male wage-earner in mechanical and manufacturing industries averages $300 per year, his normal period of industrial activity extending from the fifteenth to the sixty-fifth year. Applying this method of calculation to the actual ages of the 526 men killed in Allegheny County during the year under considera- tion, but using $200 instead of $300 as the yearly economic gain, we find that the net loss to the community at this reduced estimate was $3,828,090. In a similar way we may sum up the net economic loss to society from non-fatal injuries. According to our estimate 2,000 men injured in industrial accidents were sent to the hospitals of the county during that year. Of these, roughly 60 were totally disabled for life; 192 were partially disabled for life, their earning capacity reduced on an average 29 per cent; and the rest were totally disabled for periods ranging from one week to one year. Reckoning the loss to society from the total or temporary disablement of all these workers on the same basis, but including the cost of their maintenance during disability, we get an additional social loss of $1,320,636. Loss to society from men totally disabled for life.. $ 734,928 372,708 213,000 $1,320,636 Taken by permission from Crystal Eastman, Work-Accidents and the Law, Appendix IX, pp. 315-17. (Charities Publication Committee, 1910.) To this we must add what it cost the community to care for all these cases of injury and death. Here, however, we are dealing with an unknown quantity. The hospital charges for the year's industrial accident cases would amount to about $80,000, which we accept as the minimum of known cost for the medical care involved in a year's industrial accidents. While every year 2,000 wealth producers are withdrawn temporarily from any occupation, and 500 more permanently, as a result of industrial accidents in Allegheny County, a number of other possible wealth producers are thus permanently occupied, non-productively, in the business of patching up, repairing, putting in order, those who are injured. By such a method of estimate the net economic loss to society from one year's work-accidents in Allegheny County would be as follows: LOSS TO SOCIETY FROM ONE YEAR'S WORK-ACCIDENTS IN 215. OCCUPATIONAL DISEASES2 Besides the danger of injury from machinery and from general insanitary conditions, there are certain specially dangerous or injurious trades, in which injury by poisoning, disease, etc., is incidental to trade processes as at present conducted. Mr. William English Walling, formerly a factory inspector in Illinois, in a paper read before the Convention of Factory Inspectors in 1900, classified these dangerous trades as follows: 1. Trades in which lead is a poisonous element: the manufacture of earthenware and china; file cutting; the manufacture of white lead; lead smelting; the use of lead in print or dye works; the manufacture of red, orange, or yellow lead; glass polishing; enameling of iron plates; enameling This estimate takes no account, it should be noted, of the loss involved in the continuous succession of small injuries not serious enough to be taken to a hospital, nor of injuries more serious, but occurring too far away from a hospital to make the trip advisable, nor of injuries, often very serious in the matter of disablement, but not of a nature to require hospital care. 2 Adapted from Final Report of the Industrial Commission, 1902, XIX, 901-2. |