CHAPTER I

AFTER SIXTY—WHAT?

The progress of a nation may be marked by the care which it provides for its aged. The nineteenth-century doctrine of laissez-faire, as applied to aged and superannuated wage-earners, has been practically discarded by most civilized nations, including every English-speaking country in the world except the United States. Instead, a definite policy of social legislation has superseded the chaotic and degrading practices of alms-giving and poor relief. The enemies of social legislation in this country, however, still contend that the millions of workers in our industries “are working for themselves; that they have unrestricted control over the expenditures of their incomes, and that they have their future fate in their own hands.”[1] As a nation, we are still frightened at the thought of becoming “our brother’s keeper.” In spite of superior wealth and accumulation of goods, our national conscience is not in the least disturbed when the former creators of our wealth are forced to drag out their final days, physically exhausted, friendless and destitute, in the wretched confines of a poorhouse, or to receive some other degrading and humiliating form of pauper relief.

To protect the wage-earners in their old age is merely to recognize the changes wrought in our industrial system. Old age was not universally dreaded before the industrial revolution or the advent of the modern factory system. On the contrary, it was even looked forward to with a certain feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. In the patriarchal state, old age was revered and the aged person in tribal economy was considered the embodiment of wisdom and authority.[2] In an earlier system where the tribe or clan was a unit, the old remained supreme and their superiority continued beyond their productive years. Under the feudal system the lord was obliged to take care of his workers in case of sickness, accident, and old age. The artisan or labourer in mediaeval times ordinarily continued to work as long as he could produce something. In the early state of the factory system also the economic relations between men were more inter-dependent and of a more permanent character. The labour contract was usually lifelong, and the employer took a personal interest in the welfare of his workers. Again, in an agricultural society men and women are still useful in their old age, and their activities rarely cease before actual senility has set in. Under these conditions, men and women did not look with dread upon approaching economic old age, and there was little necessity for individual provision against it.

Our modern wage system presents an entirely different spectacle. Today, most men and women are dependent upon their daily toil for their daily bread. The pace of the present industrial system tends to wear workmen out rapidly. Fatigue produced by over speeding as well as the hazards characteristic of modern industry have shortened the period of effective production of industrial workers. Increased industrial efficiency, “scientific management,” the “bonus system” and specialized and standardized production are forces which are increasingly using up human energy at greater speed and in a briefer period of life. Often, at the age when the worker in agricultural pursuits is considered to be in his prime, the industrial worker is found to have become worn out and old. And, in industry, once the approach of old age becomes apparent, the worker is thrown upon his own resources.

Unlike the gradual physical decline in old age characteristic of agricultural and less developed industrial countries, economic superannuation, which takes place abruptly and earlier in life, stands like a spectre before industrial workers. Few industrial wage-earners may expect to continue at their accustomed work until the end of their days. Because of the developed efficiency standards, so essential to successful business, the wage-earner finds the problem of old age principally one either of increasing inability to find employment or at best of employment at low compensation. After a certain age has been attained, although the worker may still be able to do fair work, if he is no longer able to maintain his former speed, he is likely to be eliminated from industry. The old man finds it difficult to secure work even at low wages. Rowntree and Lasker, in a study of unemployment in Great Britain, found old age the primary causal factor in 23.3 per cent. of the cases studied. These investigators assert that: “It is unfortunately indisputable that when a skilled worker gets past 40, he finds it very difficult to meet with an employer who is willing to give him regular work.”[3] What is true in England in this respect is equally true in the United States.

Contrary to the conditions existing in the professions, in business, or in politics, where men often do their best work at about the age of 60, and where experience and long standing count a great deal, the industrial worker finds himself not infrequently eliminated from productive industry after passing his fiftieth birthday. With the continuous introduction of new machinery and newer processes of work, age and experience are of little value. The labor contract in the factory system is made only for a temporary period, and the employer ordinarily does not feel under obligation to support his workers during their declining years of inactivity. Thus it is not uncommon today to find aged and decrepit workers relegated to the industrial scrap-heap as useless and of no economic value. Says Prof. E. T. Devine:

“It is notorious that the insatiable factory wears out its workers with great rapidity. As it scraps machinery so it scraps human beings. The young, the vigorous, the adaptable, the supple of limb, the alert of mind, are in demand. In business and in the professions maturity of judgment and ripened experience offset, to some extent, the disadvantage of old age; but in the factory and on the railway, with spade and pick, at the spindle, at the steel converters there are no offsets. Middle age is old age, and the worn-out worker, if he has no children and if he has no savings, becomes an item in the aggregate of the unemployed. The veteran of industry who is crowded out by changes in processes and the use of new machinery is obviously an instance of maladjustment.”[4]

It will become evident in the discussions that follow, that the problem facing the aged today is largely the creation of the modern machine industry with its components of specialization, speed, and strain. It is a result of the elimination of large numbers of workers as soon as they are unable to keep up fully with the demands of modern methods of production. The introduction of new inventions and more specialized machinery, inevitable in the evolutionary process, while resulting in an ultimate good, always involves the replacing of men, which in the case of the aged, has an absolutely harmful effect, as it leaves them destitute. For, in addition to preventing their continuity in their regular work, it precludes also their adaptability to newer processes of work. The lot of the aged and superannuated worker is thus adversely affected by practically every step of industrial progress; and little or no benefit is derived by old wage-earners from industrial improvements.

Not infrequently when the difficulties facing the aged wage-earners are set forth, the smug and complacent citizen replies: “As one makes his bed, so he lies.” Poverty in old age, it is asserted, is chiefly the result of improvidence, intemperance, extravagance, thriftlessness, or similar vices. As a result of this convenient philosophy, we have made practically no attempt at the amelioration of the adverse conditions facing old age. More and more, however, it is coming to be recognized by all students of social and economic conditions that with the cost of living soaring continuously the great masses of wage-earners cannot lay aside from current wages sufficient to provide for possible emergencies. This has become especially patent as careful data on wages and incomes have been gathered by such students and responsible organizations as, Chapin, Ryan, Streightoff, Nearing, the United States Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States Department of Labor, the National Industrial Conference Board, and many of the state bureaus. This entire problem will be discussed at length in Chapter VI. It is sufficient to state here, that under present economic conditions and those of the past decade, the average wage-earning family must indeed be possessed of great resourcefulness even to make both ends meet, to say nothing of being able to save. In this connection it must also be pointed out that saving for old age is especially difficult because the need is remote and current demands press. The dangers of poverty in old age hardly impress the minds of the young. Most people have a working belief that things will be different thirty or forty years hence, a time which, indeed, seems unreal and distant. As Professor Seager aptly points out:

“The conditions of modern industry have failed to supply motives for saving sufficiently strong to take the place of those that are gone. It is true that saving is still necessary to provide for the rainy day, for loss of earning power due to illness or accident or old age, but against these needs is the insistent demand of the present for better food, for better living conditions, for educational opportunities for children. This demand is not fixed and stationary. It is always expanding.... One consequence of our living together in cities and daily observing the habits of those better off than we are is that we are under constant pressure to advance our standards. This pressure affects the wage-earner quite as much as it does the college professor. Both, when confronted with the problem of supporting a family in a modern city, find the cost of living as Mark Twain has said “a little more than you’ve got.””[5]

The problem to be faced in old age by wage-earners may thus be summarized as being two-fold in character. First, the wage-earner is confronted with the fact of being compelled to discontinue work much earlier in life than should be necessary, not because he is completely worn out, but because he is unable to maintain the pace necessary in modern production; and secondly, he faces the inability to provide individual savings to support himself in old age.

In addition, the above conditions of impotence in old age are augmented still further by the break-up of the family unit in modern society. With increasing rapidity home ties and family solidarity are being weakened and broken by the mobility so essential to modern industrial development. This is especially true in the United States and among wage-earners. The migratory and immigrant labourers move from lumber-camps to harvesting fields, railway construction, and public works as the change of employment offers. Thousands of aged workers find themselves in a strange country without friends or relatives. Many of these have never had children, or if they are parents, their children are unable to assist them. Ordinarily, the children are either unattached migrants or are married and have children of their own who must be supported and educated. No one contends that it is good social policy to have children undernourished and set to work early in life in order that they may help support the passing generation. And as a result one finds that the only source which secured sustenance and bare comfort to old age, in an earlier society, has disappeared for a great many. We, therefore, send these unfortunates, in our laissez-faire fashion, to the unfriendly poorhouses to secure the care and comforts available. Do they secure it? Says Professor Devine:

“Suicide, friendless old age, unemployment under ordinary industrial conditions, some forms of insanity and other disabling disease, immorality and crime, owe a part of their prevalence and their virulence to the absence of the capacity or opportunity for personal friendship, to the absence of those social props and safeguards which our friends naturally supply. The almshouse is the final apotheosis of friendlessness.”[6]

Indeed, once the difficulties faced in old age by the great majority of workers are realized, one cannot but wonder whether the fact that the aged population in the United States has increased from 3.5 per cent. for those 65 years of age and upward in 1880 to 4.3 per cent. in 1910, and that the expectation of life has improved, has been a desirable thing and is to be considered much of a blessing by the aged poor. Faced with conditions such as described above, and with the almshouse as the final destination of a life of destitution and drudgery, do they not look upon modern industrial development, as well as the advances made in medical progress and health as the creations of an evil spirit, which have, on the one hand, curtailed their period of production, and, on the other hand, prolonged their years of misery by the increased duration of life?