Eight Visitors

A unique delegation arrived in Manhattan last week aboard the Carmania. They were eight British workingmen. One was a patternmaker, one a boilermaker, one a blacksmith, one a toolmaker, one a molder, one an ironworker, one fitter, one a "machine man." They came to the U. S. for four weeks on invitation of the London Daily Mail, one of Lord Rothermere's papers. They are eight actual workers, not labor leaders, sent to examine working conditions, wages and industrial methods in the U. S. The newspaper is paying all their traveling expenses, paying their wives ( who remain at home) the men's usual wages, giving the men $100 each for extra clothes and $15 a week spending money, and providing each with a $5,000 life and accident insurance policy while on the trip.

Their itinerary in this country includes visits to industrial plants around New York City, to the General Electric Co. at Schenectady, to the Ford and General Motors plants at Detroit, to the steel mills at Pittsburgh and Gary and to the electric plants at Niagara.

The type of man composing the delegation is evident from a statement by one of them to the press: "Hitherto, the men at the head of the industry and the men at the head of the unions have come to America to study your production costs and your operating methods, but we are, I believe, the first who have actually put aside our overalls and left our lathes and our work benches to come and see for ourselves.

"What we don't understand, is how it is possible for American industries to pay higher wages than we are paid and yet undersell us on the same product in the world market. It may be that it is your massed production and standardization against our old theory of good workmanship, based on the individual. That is what we have come to see."

They began their tour by visiting a newspaper, an ice plant, a bakery, several power plants, and the garment factories in New York City. The most astounding thing to them was the wages paid, especially to women workers. So far as the press was concerned, they were a bit slow in formulating their estimates of what they saw, but one of them said: "One can observe the close co-operation between the worker and the employer at once. The wages, of course, are unusually high. It is my impression that high wages bring high production, although some hold it is the other way about and that high production brings high wages. We can see standardization and its effects on every hand."