ABSTRACT
Fortunately this is not the whole truth about labour. Even the charge against machinery of mechanising the worker is frequently overstated. The only productive work that is entirely automatic is done by machines. For the main trend of the development of industrial machinery has been to set non-human tools and power to undertake work which man could not execute with the required regularity, exactitude, or pace, by reason of certain organic deficiencies. While, then, the sub-divided labour in most staple industries is mostly of a narrowly prescribed and routine character, it is hardly ever so completely uniform and repetitive as that done by a machine. Purely routine work, demanding no human skill or judgment is nearly always undertaken by machinery, except where human labour can be bought so cheap that it does not pay to invent and apply machinery so as to secure some slightly increased regularity or pace of output. Where, then, as in most modern factories, human labour coöperatcs with, tends and feeds machinery, this human labour is of a less purely repetitive character than the work done by the machines. Some portions of the labour, at any rate, contain elements of skill or judgment, and are not entirely uniform.
