Studies In History, Economics And Public Law, V116, No. 2, Whole No. 259.

FOREWORD So far as the writer knows, this publication is the first that deals both with changing technology and labor displacement in representative plants and with the subsequent economic history of the men displaced. Economic sailing is rough in these years. The catastrophe ofmen tossed overboard through displacement by machines has sharply commanded attention. Technological unemployment has come to the fore as a source ofalarmed discussion. Long a news feature in newspapers and periodicals, startling and fascinating illustrations of fill displacement the air. Employers, wage earners, social-service workers, and students argue as to the proportions of the problem and disagree as to the means of dealing with it. But with sober study, doubts and modifications of original conclusions have now arisen because the phenomenon called technological unemployment has proved elusive and baffling when attempts are made to examine its nature and to measure it. The first contributions of research workers were in the form of general analysis. Valuable as these were as a beginning, more specific knowledge of what is actually occurring in particular cases became essential if measures of control were to be dis- covered . The printing industry with its clicking presses ranks high among those popularly grouped among the man-displacing trades. Partly because of this, the present study was centered on the commercial branch of printing where special alarm has been felt. The aimwas to trace the economic and social fate ofmanual press-feeders displaced by mechanical feeders. But as the search proceeded the effects of machine installation became more obscure rather than less so. The needle was in the haystackbut it was constantly slipping, and there was so much hay to clear had to be redirected and away that the original quick procedure the whole effort prolonged. The conditions that changed and controlled the course of the investigation were twofold. First, the nature of the industry which, though highly mechanized, introduces new techniques only gradually into hundreds of small competitive pressrooms where labor turnover tends to be high and regularly employed men are transferred from job to job. The second was the absence of records. In the printing industry today, and probably in most other industries, there is no provision either by employers or by unions for recording current changes in techniques or in employ- ment. Pay-roll records and union lists of men who have paid their dues are entirely inadequate for tracing the whys and wherefores of changes in employment and of separation from work. In general, the records pertinent to an inquiry of this kind were fragmentary and incomplete. The present study, therefore, bears witness to the difficulties of looking in from the outside upon an industry in process of change. It was impossible, even had it been desirable, to follow anyone method of analysis. With whatever discretion could be developed, several methods were used statistical, descriptive and inferential...