Imperialism and
Labor
By Ernest Crosby
American
Federationist, rpt. The Public 3 (Oct. 27,
1900).
The
effect upon wages of annexing new countries overrunning with the cheapest kind
of labor is evident enough to anyone who will consider the question
dispassionately, but perhaps a brief account of what I have seen with my own
eyes in Egypt may serve to illustrate it. We hear a great deal of the political
benefits conferred by the British government upon the Egyptians, but little or
nothing is said of the industrial results of expansion, and yet these results
are the most important.
Some
years ago while I was living in Egypt I visited one of the cotton mills at
Mansourah, the commercial center of the cotton region. These mills are owned by
English, French and German capitalists and operated by native labor. In the main
room of the factory the air is so thick with cotton dust that I found it
difficult to breathe. A row of Arab girls of 12 or 13 years of age were standing
there before a series of tubs manipulating the raw cotton.
"What
are the hours of labor of these girls?" I asked the European foreman, who
was acting as my guide.
"From
four o'clock in the morning to six o'clock at night, with an intermission for
dinner," he answered.
"And
what is the pay?"
"Twelve
and a half cents a day."
I
could hardly believe this, and the next time I met the English manager of one of
these mills I cross-questioned him on the subject.
"Is
it true," I asked, "that you work your girls from four until six for
twelve and one-half cents a day?"
"Yes,"
he said, rather reluctantly. "I didn't quite like it when I first went to
Mansourah, but the girls don't seem to mind it."
"Don't
mind 14 hours' work a day?" I cried.
"Oh,
that is not all," he replied. "When we are very busy they stay
overtime from six till ten o'clock in the evening and we pay them an extra
piastre (two and one-half or five cents) and sometimes young mothers come with
their babes at the breast and put them down on the floor in the corner and go to
work with the rest."
And
all this, mind you, in an atmosphere which you can almost cut with a knife, so
thick is it with cotton.
One
thing has saved Egypt, and that is the absence of coal. It costs too much to
bring it there for it to pay to introduce factories on a large scale. But there
is plenty of coal in the Philippines. Coal can be had at the entrance of the
mines in Japan for 13 cents a ton, I am informed, and it will be as cheap in the
Philippines. With coal at this price, with girls and boys ready to work for
twelve and one-half cents a day, what is to prevent the immediate flow of our
capital to these islands and the inauguration of a competition such as we have
never known before? Either wages will fall here to the twelve-and-one-half-cent
level or our factories will be moved bodily to our new possessions and our own
workingmen left to starve.
Bishop
Potter, of New York, has just been in the Philippines, and he tells us that the
Filipinos take kindly to our factory system. Poor Filipinos! So do mice take
kindly to cheese in a trap! The system will prove a curse to them as it has
already proved to the girls of Mansourah, and at the same time it will
impoverish our American wage-earners at home. It may be said that the natives
are not forced to work. But this is not true. When their cupidity is not
sufficient to make them toil, means are found to compel them. This has already
been done in the mines of South Africa, and the British government imposes taxes
upon the natives there with the avowed object of forcing them to seek employment
in the mines for the purpose of raising money to pay the tax, that being the
only way open for them to earn money. The same plan will doubtless be adopted by
our capitalists in the Philippines if it turns out that Bishop Potter is
mistaken and that the Filipinos do not take kindly to factory work.
We
are told that we ought to establish a stable government in the Philippines. That
is precisely what we ought not to do. It is the lack of stable government which
prevents capital from going to countries where people are willing to work on
starvation wages. It is an automatic arrangement of nature that in uncivilized
or partly civilized countries franchises and monopolies are not well enough
protected for capital to risk itself. If this were not so, all manufacturing
industries would seek at once the country of cheapest wages, other things being
equal, and the starvation of the home populations would follow. It is best for
the world that the government of such countries should not be too stable, and by
insisting upon a stable government in the Philippines we are doing our best to
throttle our own industries.
It
is clearly the interest of all wage-earners to oppose imperialism root and
branch, and if they have any doubt on the subject, let them consider the cotton
operatives of Egypt.
