Who Makes What?

All industry is interrelated, so much so that it could be said that there is really only one industry--the production of goods and services. Consider your coat and the processes necessary to its production. It required not only the labor and materials used directly in making it, but also the buildings and machinery where it was made. It required the production of the material and the dyes. It required the transportation and the planning for all the trips for all the materials in it, and for the machinery and buildings used in making them.

The workers involved in all these processes could not have specialized in making cloth and dyes in building factories and textile machinery, in operating this equipment, in transporting goods, and the like, if other workers had not specialized in building houses for them, providing food for them, and offering the various other services they needed. In fact it is difficult to think of anything the workers do anywhere that does not have some connection with the production of a simple coat.

But this work is not random chaos. It is subdivided and organized much as your own body is subdivided and organized. It divides first of all into six major departments:

• 100 - The raw materials that can be grown or raised;
• 200 - The raw materials of the mine, quarry and the like;
• 300 - Construction of roads and buildings, ships, docks, canals, etc.;
• 400 - Manufacture of the materials into food, clothing, tools, machinery, etc.;
• 500 - Transportation and communication;
• 600 - The various services offered by schools, hospitals, theaters, shops, and public utilities.

Corresponding to these major divisions are the six departments in which the industrial unions are grouped in the table at the end of this pamphlet. The advantages in practical union matters in providing these departments will be pointed out later on.

Within the departments are the industries and their industrial unions. Because of the interrelations that bind all productive efforts together, it is impossible to mark off the disputed territory of each industry with indisputable precision. An industry, after all, is a social aggregate of workers, equipment, and processes only somewhat set apart from other workers by their close interrelations. Accordingly, the line separating the industrial unions should not be thought of as a way of keeping the workers apart, but as a better way of keeping them together.

Next page: Industrial Classification