DEMOCRACY AND INDUSTRY
Perhaps no word is more overworked nowadays than the word "democracy,"
and those who shout loudest about it, I think, as a rule, want it least.
I am always suspicious of men who speak glibly of democracy. I wonder if
they want to set up some kind of a despotism or if they want to have
somebody do for them what they ought to do for themselves. I am for the
kind of democracy that gives to each an equal chance according to his
ability. I think if we give more attention to serving our fellows we
shall have less concern with the empty forms of government and more
concern with the things to be done. Thinking of service, we shall not
bother about good feeling in industry or life; we shall not bother about
masses and classes, or closed and open shops, and such matters as have
nothing at all to do with the real business of living. We can get down
to facts. We stand in need of facts.
It is a shock when the mind awakens to the fact that not all of humanity
is human--that whole groups of people do not regard others with humane
feelings. Great efforts have been made to have this appear as the
attitude of a class, but it is really the attitude of all "classes," in
so far as they are swayed by the false notion of "classes." Before, when
it was the constant effort of propaganda to make the people believe that
it was only the "rich" who were without humane feelings, the opinion
became general that among the "poor" the humane virtues flourished.
But the "rich" and the "poor" are both very small minorities, and you
cannot classify society under such heads. There are not enough "rich"
and there are not enough "poor" to serve the purpose of such
classification. Rich men have become poor without changing their
natures, and poor men have become rich, and the problem has not been
affected by it.
Between the rich and the poor is the great mass of the people who are
neither rich nor poor. A society made up exclusively of millionaires
would not be different from our present society; some of the
millionaires would have to raise wheat and bake bread and make machinery
and run trains--else they would all starve to death. Someone must do the
work. Really we have no fixed classes. We have men who will work and men
who will not. Most of the "classes" that one reads about are purely
fictional. Take certain capitalist papers. You will be amazed by some of
the statements about the labouring class. We who have been and still are
a part of the labouring class know that the statements are untrue. Take
certain of the labour papers. You are equally amazed by some of the
statements they make about "capitalists." And yet on both sides there is
a grain of truth. The man who is a capitalist and nothing else, who
gambles with the fruits of other men's labours, deserves all that is
said against him. He is in precisely the same class as the cheap gambler
who cheats workingmen out of their wages. The statements we read about
the labouring class in the capitalistic press are seldom written by
managers of great industries, but by a class of writers who are writing
what they think will please their employers. They write what they
imagine will please. Examine the labour press and you will find another
class of writers who similarly seek to tickle the prejudices which they
conceive the labouring man to have. Both kinds of writers are mere
propagandists. And propaganda that does not spread facts is
self-destructive. And it should be. You cannot preach patriotism to men
for the purpose of getting them to stand still while you rob them--and
get away with that kind of preaching very long. You cannot preach the
duty of working hard and producing plentifully, and make that a screen
for an additional profit to yourself. And neither can the worker conceal
the lack of a day's work by a phrase.
Undoubtedly the employing class possesses facts which the employed ought
to have in order to construct sound opinions and pass fair judgments.
Undoubtedly the employed possess facts which are equally important to
the employer. It is extremely doubtful, however, if either side has all
the facts. And this is where propaganda, even if it were possible for it
to be entirely successful, is defective. It is not desirable that one
set of ideas be "put over" on a class holding another set of ideas. What
we really need is to get all the ideas together and construct from them.
Take, for instance, this whole matter of union labour and the right to
strike.
The only strong group of union men in the country is the group that
draws salaries from the unions. Some of them are very rich. Some of them
are interested in influencing the affairs of our large institutions of
finance. Others are so extreme in their so-called socialism that they
border on Bolshevism and anarchism--their union salaries liberating them
from the necessity of work so that they can devote their energies to
subversive propaganda. All of them enjoy a certain prestige and power
which, in the natural course of competition, they could not otherwise
have won.
If the official personnel of the labour unions were as strong, as
honest, as decent, and as plainly wise as the bulk of the men who make
up the membership, the whole movement would have taken on a different
complexion these last few years. But this official personnel, in the
main--there are notable exceptions--has not devoted itself to an
alliance with the naturally strong qualities of the workingman; it has
rather devoted itself to playing upon his weaknesses, principally upon
the weaknesses of that newly arrived portion of the population which
does not yet know what Americanism is, and which never will know if left
to the tutelage of their local union leaders.
The workingmen, except those few who have been inoculated with the
fallacious doctrine of "the class war" and who have accepted the
philosophy that progress consists in fomenting discord in industry
("When you get your $12 a day, don't stop at that. Agitate for $14. When
you get your eight hours a day, don't be a fool and grow contented;
agitate for six hours. Start something! Always start something!"), have
the plain sense which enables them to recognize that with principles
accepted and observed, conditions change. The union leaders have never
seen that. They wish conditions to remain as they are, conditions of
injustice, provocation, strikes, bad feeling, and crippled national
life. Else where would be the need for union officers? Every strike is a
new argument for them; they point to it and say, "You see! You still
need us."
The only true labour leader is the one who leads labour to work and to
wages, and not the leader who leads labour to strikes, sabotage, and
starvation. The union of labour which is coming to the fore in this
country is the union of all whose interests are interdependent--whose
interests are altogether dependent on the usefulness and efficiency of
the service they render.
There is a change coming. When the union of "union leaders" disappears,
with it will go the union of blind bosses--bosses who never did a decent
thing for their employees until they were compelled. If the blind boss
was a disease, the selfish union leader was the antidote. When the union
leader became the disease, the blind boss became the antidote. Both are
misfits, both are out of place in well-organized society. And they are
both disappearing together.
It is the blind boss whose voice is heard to-day saying, "Now is the
time to smash labour, we've got them on the run." That voice is going
down to silence with the voice that preaches "class war." The
producers--from the men at the drawing board to the men on the moulding
floor--have gotten together in a real union, and they will handle their
own affairs henceforth.
The exploitation of dissatisfaction is an established business to-day.
Its object is not to settle anything, nor to get anything done, but to
keep dissatisfaction in existence. And the instruments used to do this
are a whole set of false theories and promises which can never be
fulfilled as long as the earth remains what it is.
I am not opposed to labour organization. I am not opposed to any sort of
organization that makes for progress. It is organizing to limit
production--whether by employers or by workers--that matters.
The workingman himself must be on guard against some very dangerous
notions--dangerous to himself and to the welfare of the country. It is
sometimes said that the less a worker does, the more jobs he creates for
other men. This fallacy assumes that idleness is creative. Idleness
never created a job. It creates only burdens. The industrious man never
runs his fellow worker out of a job; indeed, it is the industrious man
who is the partner of the industrious manager--who creates more and more
business and therefore more and more jobs. It is a great pity that the
idea should ever have gone abroad among sensible men that by
"soldiering" on the job they help someone else. A moment's thought will
show the weakness of such an idea. The healthy business, the business
that is always making more and more opportunities for men to earn an
honourable and ample living, is the business in which every man does a
day's work of which he is proud. And the country that stands most
securely is the country in which men work honestly and do not play
tricks with the means of production. We cannot play fast and loose with
economic laws, because if we do they handle us in very hard ways.
The fact that a piece of work is now being done by nine men which used
to be done by ten men does not mean that the tenth man is unemployed. He
is merely not employed on that work, and the public is not carrying the
burden of his support by paying more than it ought on that work--for
after all, it is the public that pays!
An industrial concern which is wide enough awake to reorganize for
efficiency, and honest enough with the public to charge it necessary
costs and no more, is usually such an enterprising concern that it has
plenty of jobs at which to employ the tenth man. It is bound to grow,
and growth means jobs. A well-managed concern is always seeking to lower
the labour cost to the public; and it is certain to employ more men than
the concern which loafs along and makes the public pay the cost of its
mismanagement.
The tenth man was an unnecessary cost. The ultimate consumer was paying
him. But the fact that he was unnecessary on that particular job does
not mean that he is unnecessary in the work of the world, or even in the
work of his particular shop.
The public pays for all mismanagement. More than half the trouble with
the world to-day is the "soldiering" and dilution and cheapness and
inefficiency for which the people are paying their good money. Wherever
two men are being paid for what one can do, the people are paying double
what they ought. And it is a fact that only a little while ago in the
United States, man for man, we were not producing what we did for
several years previous to the war.
A day's work means more than merely being "on duty" at the shop for the
required number of hours. It means giving an equivalent in service for
the wage drawn. And when that equivalent is tampered with either
way--when the man gives more than he receives, or receives more than he
gives--it is not long before serious dislocation will be manifest.
Extend that condition throughout the country, and you have a complete
upset of business. All that industrial difficulty means is the
destruction of basic equivalents in the shop. Management must share the
blame with labour. Management has been lazy, too. Management has found
it easier to hire an additional five hundred men than to so improve its
methods that one hundred men of the old force could be released to other
work. The public was paying, and business was booming, and management
didn't care a pin. It was no different in the office from what it was in
the shop. The law of equivalents was broken just as much by managers as
by workmen. Practically nothing of importance is secured by mere demand.
That is why strikes always fail--even though they may seem to succeed. A
strike which brings higher wages or shorter hours and passes on the
burden to the community is really unsuccessful. It only makes the
industry less able to serve--and decreases the number of jobs that it
can support. This is not to say that no strike is justified--it may draw
attention to an evil. Men can strike with justice--that they will
thereby get justice is another question. The strike for proper
conditions and just rewards is justifiable. The pity is that men should
be compelled to use the strike to get what is theirs by right. No
American ought to be compelled to strike for his rights. He ought to
receive them naturally, easily, as a matter of course. These justifiable
strikes are usually the employer's fault. Some employers are not fit for
their jobs. The employment of men--the direction of their energies, the
arranging of their rewards in honest ratio to their production and to
the prosperity of the business--is no small job. An employer may be
unfit for his job, just as a man at the lathe may be unfit. Justifiable
strikes are a sign that the boss needs another job--one that he can
handle. The unfit employer causes more trouble than the unfit employee.
You can change the latter to another more suitable job. But the former
must usually be left to the law of compensation. The justified strike,
then, is one that need never have been called if the employer had done
his work.
There is a second kind of strike--the strike with a concealed design. In
this kind of strike the workingmen are made the tools of some
manipulator who seeks his own ends through them. To illustrate: Here is
a great industry whose success is due to having met a public need with
efficient and skillful production. It has a record for justice. Such an
industry presents a great temptation to speculators. If they can only
gain control of it they can reap rich benefit from all the honest effort
that has been put into it. They can destroy its beneficiary wage and
profit-sharing, squeeze every last dollar out of the public, the
product, and the workingman, and reduce it to the plight of other
business concerns which are run on low principles. The motive may be the
personal greed of the speculators or they may want to change the policy
of a business because its example is embarrassing to other employers who
do not want to do what is right. The industry cannot be touched from
within, because its men have no reason to strike. So another method is
adopted. The business may keep many outside shops busy supplying it with
material. If these outside shops can be tied up, then that great
industry may be crippled.
So strikes are fomented in the outside industries. Every attempt is made
to curtail the factory's source of supplies. If the workingmen in the
outside shops knew what the game was, they would refuse to play it, but
they don't know; they serve as the tools of designing capitalists
without knowing it. There is one point, however, that ought to rouse the
suspicions of workingmen engaged in this kind of strike. If the strike
cannot get itself settled, no matter what either side offers to do, it
is almost positive proof that there is a third party interested in
having the strike continue. That hidden influence does not want a
settlement on any terms. If such a strike is won by the strikers, is the
lot of the workingman improved? After throwing the industry into the
hands of outside speculators, are the workmen given any better treatment
or wages?
There is a third kind of strike--the strike that is provoked by the
money interests for the purpose of giving labour a bad name. The
American workman has always had a reputation for sound judgment. He has
not allowed himself to be led away by every shouter who promised to
create the millennium out of thin air. He has had a mind of his own and
has used it. He has always recognized the fundamental truth that the
absence of reason was never made good by the presence of violence. In
his way the American workingman has won a certain prestige with his own
people and throughout the world. Public opinion has been inclined to
regard with respect his opinions and desires. But there seems to be a
determined effort to fasten the Bolshevik stain on American Labour by
inciting it to such impossible attitudes and such wholly unheard-of
actions as shall change public sentiment from respect to criticism.
Merely avoiding strikes, however, does not promote industry. We may say
to the workingman:
"You have a grievance, but the strike is no remedy--it only makes the
situation worse whether you win or lose."
Then the workingman may admit this to be true and refrain from striking.
Does that settle anything?
No! If the worker abandons strikes as an unworthy means of bringing
about desirable conditions, it simply means that employers must get busy
on their own initiative and correct defective conditions.
The experience of the Ford industries with the workingman has been
entirely satisfactory, both in the United States and abroad. We have no
antagonism to unions, but we participate in no arrangements with either
employee or employer organizations. The wages paid are always higher
than any reasonable union could think of demanding and the hours of work
are always shorter. There is nothing that a union membership could do
for our people. Some of them may belong to unions, probably the majority
do not. We do not know and make no attempt to find out, for it is a
matter of not the slightest concern to us. We respect the unions,
sympathize with their good aims and denounce their bad ones. In turn I
think that they give us respect, for there has never been any
authoritative attempt to come between the men and the management in our
plants. Of course radical agitators have tried to stir up trouble now
and again, but the men have mostly regarded them simply as human
oddities and their interest in them has been the same sort of interest
that they would have in a four-legged man.
In England we did meet the trades union question squarely in our
Manchester plant. The workmen of Manchester are mostly unionized, and
the usual English union restrictions upon output prevail. We took over a
body plant in which were a number of union carpenters. At once the union
officers asked to see our executives and arrange terms. We deal only
with our own employees and never with outside representatives, so our
people refused to see the union officials. Thereupon they called the
carpenters out on strike. The carpenters would not strike and were
expelled from the union. Then the expelled men brought suit against the
union for their share of the benefit fund. I do not know how the
litigation turned out, but that was the end of interference by trades
union officers with our operations in England.
We make no attempt to coddle the people who work with us. It is
absolutely a give-and-take relation. During the period in which we
largely increased wages we did have a considerable supervisory force.
The home life of the men was investigated and an effort was made to find
out what they did with their wages. Perhaps at the time it was
necessary; it gave us valuable information. But it would not do at all
as a permanent affair and it has been abandoned.
We do not believe in the "glad hand," or the professionalized "personal
touch," or "human element." It is too late in the day for that sort of
thing. Men want something more than a worthy sentiment. Social
conditions are not made out of words. They are the net result of the
daily relations between man and man. The best social spirit is evidenced
by some act which costs the management something and which benefits all.
That is the only way to prove good intentions and win respect.
Propaganda, bulletins, lectures--they are nothing. It is the right act
sincerely done that counts.
A great business is really too big to be human. It grows so large as to
supplant the personality of the man. In a big business the employer,
like the employee, is lost in the mass. Together they have created a
great productive organization which sends out articles that the world
buys and pays for in return money that provides a livelihood for
everyone in the business. The business itself becomes the big thing.
There is something sacred about a big business which provides a living
for hundreds and thousands of families. When one looks about at the
babies coming into the world, at the boys and girls going to school, at
the young workingmen who, on the strength of their jobs, are marrying
and setting up for themselves, at the thousands of homes that are being
paid for on installments out of the earnings of men--when one looks at a
great productive organization that is enabling all these things to be
done, then the continuance of that business becomes a holy trust. It
becomes greater and more important than the individuals.
The employer is but a man like his employees and is subject to all the
limitations of humanity. He is justified in holding his job only as he
can fill it. If he can steer the business straight, if his men can trust
him to run his end of the work properly and without endangering their
security, then he is filling his place. Otherwise he is no more fit for
his position than would be an infant. The employer, like everyone else,
is to be judged solely by his ability. He may be but a name to the
men--a name on a signboard. But there is the business--it is more than a
name. It produces the living--and a living is a pretty tangible thing.
The business is a reality. It does things. It is a going concern. The
evidence of its fitness is that the pay envelopes keep coming.
You can hardly have too much harmony in business. But you can go too far
in picking men because they harmonize. You can have so much harmony that
there will not be enough of the thrust and counterthrust which is
life--enough of the competition which means effort and progress. It is
one thing for an organization to be working harmoniously toward one
object, but it is another thing for an organization to work harmoniously
with each individual unit of itself. Some organizations use up so much
energy and time maintaining a feeling of harmony that they have no force
left to work for the object for which the organization was created. The
organization is secondary to the object. The only harmonious
organization that is worth anything is an organization in which all the
members are bent on the one main purpose--to get along toward the
objective. A common purpose, honestly believed in, sincerely
desired--that is the great harmonizing principle.
I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always
have "an atmosphere of good feeling" around him before he can do his
work. There are such men. And in the end, unless they obtain enough
mental and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on
"feeling," they are failures. Not only are they business failures; they
are character failures also; it is as if their bones never attained a
sufficient degree of hardness to enable them to stand on their own feet.
There is altogether too much reliance on good feeling in our business
organizations. People have too great a fondness for working with the
people they like. In the end it spoils a good many valuable qualities.
Do not misunderstand me; when I use the term "good feeling" I mean that
habit of making one's personal likes and dislikes the sole standard of
judgment. Suppose you do not like a man. Is that anything against him?
It may be something against you. What have your likes or dislikes to do
with the facts? Every man of common sense knows that there are men whom
he dislikes, who are really more capable than he is himself.
And taking all this out of the shop and into the broader fields, it is
not necessary for the rich to love the poor or the poor to love the
rich. It is not necessary for the employer to love the employee or for
the employee to love the employer. What is necessary is that each should
try to do justice to the other according to his deserts. That is real
democracy and not the question of who ought to own the bricks and the
mortar and the furnaces and the mills. And democracy has nothing to do
with the question, "Who ought to be boss?"
That is very much like asking: "Who ought to be the tenor in the
quartet?" Obviously, the man who can sing tenor. You could not have
deposed Caruso. Suppose some theory of musical democracy had consigned
Caruso to the musical proletariat. Would that have reared another tenor
to take his place? Or would Caruso's gifts have still remained his own?