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DELEGATE MITCHELL: I would like
to request that the new language which
has been accepted by the Committee and
which is the proposal to be substituted in-
stead of section 9, the language that pres-
ently appears in section —
THE CHAIRMAN: You want it to be
distributed?
DELEGATE MITCHELL: It should be
distributed so it can be on the desks.
THE CHAIRMAN: Pages, please dis-
tribute amendment E.
You may proceed, Delegate Mitchell.
DELEGATE MITCHELL: Mr. Presi-
dent, fellow delegates, the war in Viet Nam
and the troubles in Greece and the skir-
mishes in other sections of the world are
not the only wars that confront us as we
sit here in this Convention. There is an-
other war and a continuing battle, but it
is between man and the machines. The
first industrial revolution was brought in
by steam by the discovery of steam and
electricity, but we are now in a second in-
dustrial revolution brought on by elec-
tronics and atomics.
Now, in the first industrial revolution at
least men were needed to man the machines
in the factories and thousands of men
poured from the farms into the cities to
man the machines in the factories, to im-
prove the standard of living, and to in-
crease the volume of the output of goods
necessary to raise our living standards.
But we have a peculiar revolution now
facing us. This second industrial revolution
is a revolution in which the machines are
replacing men, and it is of great concern
to our national economy and to the econo-
mies in our State.
The warning of the economies, the warn-
ings that we see everywhere in our State
in the conditions of the people who are
being displaced from employment by ma-
chines cannot be ignored as we sit in this
Constitutional Convention.
There has been a lot of talk about nat-
ural rights as the basis of our Constitu-
tion's Bill of Rights based on John Locke's
theory of natural rights. The United Na-
tions changed the name a little bit and
called it "human rights." Certainly as we
sit here today one of the natural rights
and human rights of any human being
born into the society of our State is the
right to have a job, the right to have
meaningful employment if he is able bodied
and wants to work. But because machines
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are displacing men, we have an entirely
new problem in unemployment in our na-
tion. It is called involuntary idleness.
Whole factories are being displaced be-
cause of automation, by the rapidity of the
technological advances. It is cheaper for
manufacturers to rebuild entire factories
in new locations than to attempt to revise
and restructure the old machinery in the
old location so that all over our nation and
even in our cities there are communities of
people who are left without employment
when factories pull up and move on.
Now, there is an old concept of unem-
ployment and poverty which we have got to
take a hard look at, and that is that if
you want to work, you can get a job and
you can pull yourself up by your boot-
straps. At Christmas everybody begins to
shell out some money to the poor, but none
of us are really sitting down to look at this
problem in all of its aspects. If we, with
all of our intelligence and creativity, can
put a man in outer space, we can solve
this chronically continuing high unemploy-
ment rate which results from the second
industrial revolution.
Now, in our own State, the problems are
everywhere. I first became aware of it
when I interceded for a man who had
broken mentally under the stresses and
strains of domestic problems and had to go
into a mental hospital for recuperation.
When I interceded with the steel company
where he was employed, there was no
longer a job for him in spite of his twelve
years of seniority. The company, at a cost
of some two million dollars, had installed
new machinery which would displace four
hundred men who had been working at that
plant. I became aware then and began to
give study to the whole situation of the
rapid advance of technology and the lag
in the preparation by our private sector
and public sector, by government and in-
dustry for the social and human malad-
justments which result.
We cannot afford another depression. I
was just coming out of high school in that
depression. The rich people threw them-
selves out of windows, the poor people just
starved, and the banks shut down. There
was little or no work for most of the peo-
ple. Then our nation and our states got
together and worked together with the kind
of programs to put people back to work.
Should we wait for another depression?
Should we wait for another collapse?
Should we fail with all of our intelligence
and our ability and our creativity without
providing in the life of our State the ade-
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