A trade union leader speaking at a conference at Blackpool (England) on May 24, 1959, said:
"Automation in factory and office, instead of enhancing the workers standard of living, is producing redundancy and unemployment, and the workers remaining in employment are not better-off.".
A journalist, when reporting this, branded the speaker as a Luddite, in favor of destroying all machinery, against all progress, and a believer that quill pens are good in offices because their use would mean that many more workers would be needed to do work.
He then tried to prove that the development of the machine during the last century and a half has multiplied the jobs available in this country. Here we can see the evidence of the effect of that insidious brain-washing whereby is propagated the barbarous idea that the purpose of industry is simply to provide jobs for workers, and that the object of life is "employment". Trade union leaders have a vested interest in "employment" so that the prospect of automation naturally frightens them, and it is perhaps too much to expect any clear thought from them in such circumstances.
Meanwhile the National Debt keeps growing; and last year the revenue men collected 2,222 million pounds on account of Income Tax; whilst the purchasing power of the pound fell by 77 percent between 1914 and 1957. Here are three evils that the advance of automation is bound to intensify so long as the present stone-age system of finance is retained. Yet automation is a good thing in itself because it has the potentiality of freeing the "workers" from labour slavery.
The benefits of automation, though at present largely frustrated by financial policy, are, nevertheless, already creating a problem for those who rule us. It is a problem of abundance, which would become embarrassing if it were used to produce consumer goods instead instead of being largely diverted into costly armament plans and concealed aids to political international "power" schemes wasted overseas.
The workers by hand or brain, redundant or otherwise, can only arrive at the benefits of automation when the wages of the machine are distributed as a regular "dividend' without passing such wages into prices.
This is one of the benefits Social Credit finance would provide, and the Income Tax man would find his duties reversed by Social Credit; for instead of collecting taxes, his new job would be that of distributing dividends, payable to consumers so that they could purchase what they want from the abundance automation has already made practical; free of debt, free of taxes, and paid as birthright, in addition to earned wages.
George Hickling in Credit Notes, July, 1959.
A single Californian hatchery, with an incubator capacity of 500,000 eggs at a time, hatches three million chickens a year by electricity. Again, four to six cows can be milked at one time with an electric milker, of which in 1926 there were some 100,000 in the U.S. A. alone.
The white collar industries and professions are not immune from the Machine's blessings and curses, its labour-saving and its labour-ousting. 1933 saw the installation in the city office of one of the "Big Five" banks, according to the Sunday Express, of a machine four feet high, like a mammoth typewriter with levers instead of keys. Operated by one girl and doing the work of sixty bank clerks, this machine deals with 60,000 separate ledger entries in an hour, records the code numbers of the client and the cheque, the amount paid in or out, the total balance and interest due, and if the machine makes a mistake it shows a red card.
The Meaning of Social Credit..... by Maurice Colbourne, pp. 45-46
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.. by Mo.
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