Like other skilled laborers, New York City machinist John Morrison saw the introduction of machinery that accompanied industrialization as a threat to his identity as a craftsman. Though highly paid compared with unskilled workers, craftsmen led the way in organizing unions and engaging in strikes against big business. In the following excerpt from his testimony before a U.S. Senate committee investigating conflicts between capital and labor, Morrison discusses the source of many skilled workingmen’s discontent.
Question: Is there any difference between the conditions under which machinery is made now and those which existed ten years ago?
Answer: A great deal of difference.
Question: State the differences as well as you can.
Answer: Well, the trade has been subdivided and those subdivisions have been again subdivided, so that a man never learns the machinist’s trade now. Ten years ago he learned, not the whole of the trade, but a fair portion of it. Also, there is more machinery used in the business, which again makes machinery. In the case of making the sewing-machine, for instance, you find that the trade is so subdivided that a man is not considered a machinist at all. Hence it is merely laborers’ work and it is laborers that work at that branch of our trade. The different branches of the trade are divided and subdivided so that one man may make just a particular part of a machine and may not know anything whatever about another part of the same machine. In that way machinery is produced a great deal cheaper than it used to be formerly, and in fact, through this system of work, 100 men are able to do now what it took 300 or 400 men to do fifteen years ago. By the use of machinery and the subdivision of the trade they so simplify the work that it is made a great deal easier and put together a great deal faster. There is no system of apprenticeship, I may say, in the business. You simply go in and learn whatever branch you are put at, and you stay at that unless you are changed to another. . . .
Question: Are the machinists here generally contented, or are they in a state of discontent and unrest?
Answer: There is mostly a general feeling of discontent, and you will find among the machinists the most radical workingmen, with the most revo-lutionary ideas. You will find that they don’t so much give their thoughts simply to trade unions and other efforts of that kind, but they go far beyond that; they only look for relief through the ballot or through a revolution, a forcible revolution.
Source: Report of the Committee of the Senate upon the Relations between Labor and Capital, 48th Cong. (1885), 755–59.
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