June 20, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY

Page 5

Help Wanted to Run Industry

"The social history of the world verifies this proposition. To make a nation prosperous, remunerative employment must be accessible to all its people."

William D. Kelley

In every period of rapid economic growth in American history, our nation has been faced with a serious shortage of skilled labor. In periods such as the decades right after the establishment of the United States, the 1860s, and the early 20th century, the skilled labor crisis was solved through a twopronged approach of upgrading the educational and skill level of the native population and recruiting skilled labor from abroad. On Jan. 31, 1866 Pennsylvania Congressman William D. Kelley delivered a stirring address to the House of Representatives on the labor shortage crisis then facing the nation. Kelley was one of the closest collaborators of American System economist Henry Carey, and shared Carey's perceptions about the difference between the American and British Systems. On labor policy, he contrasted the British method of depressing the wages of their workforce to permit the dumping of cheap British goods on foreign markets with the American approach of paying its workers higher wages so that the entire nation would benefit from a population with a higher skill level and standard of living.

In the passage which follows, Kelley emphasizes that rising, remunerative employment depends on the growth of a diversified economyone which is not stuck in the mode of agriculture and commerce, but is generating new manufacturing industries. Kelley's speech is a good primer for anyone who believes that "technology destroys jobs." Sir, the pressing want of our country is men. We need not sigh for additional territory. We need go to no foreign nation for any product of agriculture. Abundant as are our ascertained stores of gold, silver, coal, iron, copper, zinc, lead, cinnabar, kaolin, petroleum, and the infinite number of substances man has utilized, the extent of our mineral wealth is unmeasured and unimagined. And our ocean-bound coasts, the immense inland seas that bound us on the north, the land-locked Gulf that laves our southern shores, and our grand rivers, impel us to commercial enterprise, and proclaim the one great want of our country to be men. Labor alone can make these unparalleled resources available; and when by securing to industry its just reward we shall develop and attract hither from other lands a supply of labor that will make the march of our conquest over the elements of our wealth steadily progressive, our debt, though expressed by the numerals required to tell it now, will shrink into comparative insignificance, and the Powers which by treachery and disregard of international law during the last four years would have destroyed us, will assume relatively Lilliputian proportions. . . But to make labor fully available it must be steadily employed and generously rewarded, and to secure these results the employments of a country must be largely diversified. A nation whose territory is broad and remote from dense populations cannot, by pursuing commerce and agriculture alone, prosper or endure. This is the decree of nature. Land, as well as man, requires rest and food; and a purely agricultural and commercial nation can afford neither of these. The social history of the world verifies this proposition. To make a nation prosperous remunerative employment must be accessible to all its people; and to that end industry must be so diversified that he who has not the strength for agricultural or other labor requiring muscle may make his feeble sinews available in some gentler employ-

ment. Agriculture and commerce afford few stimulants to inventive genius; diversified industry offers many. Childhood in a purely agricultural community is wasted in idleness, as are the winter months of robust men, and to realize the truth of the maxim that time is money, the varied industry of a country should offer employment to all for all seasons of the year, that each day may be made to earn its own subsistence. And herein is illustrated the harmony of interests, for where diversity of employment is successfully promoted, agriculture finds its readiest markets and earns its richest rewards: for within accessible distance from the city or town the farmer has a market for those perishable productions which will not bear extended transportation, but the cultivation of which, in alternation with white or hard crops, strengthens and enriches his land. But of this hereafter . . .