HKB
find this same process going on, whereby the proportion of capital which consists of raw material is reduced, and the proportion which consists in machinery and other fixed capital enhanced.
The growth of the unit of capital in the developed modern manufacturing business entails also a growth in the unit of labour, though not a corresponding growth. The number of employees in a business is larger in proportion as the business passes into the stage of highest industrial organisation. In the United States in 1880 it was estimated that the average number of employees in a manufacturing business for the whole country was a little less than 11, but in the chief manufacturing states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island it was about 25, while in Pittsburg, the great centre of iron industry, it was more than 33.
Sec. 3. In addition to increased size we find increased and ever-increasing complexity of structure in the business-unit. This has proceeded in two directions, horizontally and laterally--that is to say, by subdivision and accession of processes on the one hand, and by an increased variety of products, and therefore of processes, upon the other hand. The constantly growing specialisation of fixed capital and of labour in our factories and workshops is a commonplace. Adam Smith's famous pin manufactory, with its ten separate processes, has been left far behind. In a modern shoe factory in the United States there are sixty-four distinct processes. Grain, in the elaborate machinery of a steam flour mill, passes through a score of different stages, cleaning, winnowing, grinding, etc. The American machine-made watch is the product of 370 separate processes. The organisation of a modern textile factory provides a dozen different processes contributing to the spinning or weaving of cotton or silk. New processes of cleaning, finishing, and ornamenting are continually being added. The subsidiary process of packing, the manufacture of packing cases, the printing of labels, etc., are taken on in many factories.[108] Many branches of production which were formerly carried on in separate places and as separate business-units are grouped together under the factory roof, or if still separated locally, and executed by separate machinery and power, are related as forming part of the same business, and are under the same management. So in the woollen manufactures the preliminary processes of sorting and cleansing, carding or combing, as well as the main processes of spinning and weaving, fulling, dyeing, and finishing, each of which was once committed to a separate and independent group of workers, are now frequently found going on simultaneously in a single factory.[109] Thus a number of small simple business-units representing the various stages in the production of a commodity, come to group themselves into a large complex unit.