III. (2)

It is difficult to find a standard for the minor industries which is suitable to all branches of manufacture. A flour mill employing 7 or 8 workmen does not fall within the minor industries, while a weaving establishment which only employs ten workmen does.

The directors of the Belgian census take as their empirical standard the figure of four workmen and less; 55,000 enterprises (or 23.76 per cent.) or one-fourth of the total number of those employing at least one workman fall within this standard. They represent a total of 96,000 workmen, or an average of less than two for each enterprise or division of an enterprise. The tailors, dressmakers, shoemakers, joiners, carpenters, bakers, farriers, locksmiths, masons, painters, wheelwrights, slaters, plumbers, seamstresses, milliners, etc., are all included in the minor industries, and a large proportion even in quite the smallest industries.

In Belgium, moderate-sized industries are taken as including establishments employing from 5 to 49 workmen; their number is 13,380, or 6 per cent. of the whole, and they are represented by 173,000 workmen, or 26 per cent. of the total number of workmen. These industries include the businesses of masons, breweries and maltsters, builders, carpenters and joiners, ladies' clothing manufacturers, quarries, foundries, metal workers, etc.

The larger industries, employing from 50 to 499 workmen, include 2,000 establishments, represented by a working population of 295,000, or 146 workmen per enterprise or division of an enterprise. Of a total of 664,000 workmen engaged in industry properly so called, there are therefore 295,000, or 44 per cent. employed in these greater industries. In the coal mining industry, out of 115,800 workmen, there are 86,000 who form part of this group of larger industries. Deducting these, we find 209,000 workmen, representing 142 per enterprise and 38.78 per cent. of the total number of workmen. These large enterprises include the same kind of industries as are found in the United States and in France—the metal trades and constitutional metal works and spinning factories. Of 100 workmen, 44 are employed in the larger, and 15 in the largest, industries—a total of 59 per cent.

By a computation uniting the complex enterprises the Report arrives (p. 23) at the following result:—

This would give 24 per cent., or a quarter of the total number of workmen employed in the largest industries. This is in accordance with the character of Belgian industries—mines, constructional metal works, spinning factories and weaving mills.

This population is classified as follows:—

I have included managers, overseers and clerks in the same class with the heads of establishments, because the workmen look upon them as having interests distinct from their own.

We therefore have on the one hand 71 per cent. of wage-earners as against 29 per cent. of heads of establishments and clerks; that is rather less than three wage-earners for one head of an establishment. The smallest industries are represented by 70 per cent. and the minor industries (4 workmen and less) by 23 per cent. To this must be added the home industries. The greater industries have therefore not stifled the smaller ones in Belgium any more than in the United States and in France. The facts do not confirm the theory of the concentration of industries put forward by Karl Marx in any of these three countries.

I suggested at the sitting of the International Statistical Institute, held at Copenhagen in August, 1907, that the word “concentration” ought not to be employed in the language of statistics except for the purpose of denoting an absolute and a relative decrease in the number of agricultural, industrial, commercial, financial establishments, correlative with an increase in the total activity of the category into which they fall. This suggestion was referred to the Committee which was appointed at this Congress for the purpose of dealing with statistical terminology.