ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY--THE AMERICAN WAY
As machine power rivalled hand work, promoters of industry until
recently relied for its advancement on the perfection of technology,
giving little thought to the perfection of labor. It was confidently
assumed that labor, out of its own necessities, would adapt itself
automatically to the new requirements of the machine, and to the
shifts of business interest. When it was discovered that there were
limitations to labor's voluntary adaptation under the conditions laid
down, intelligent business in America decided that the responsibility
for realizing labor's adaptation or "labor's coöperation" as they
call it, must be assumed by the management of industry and that that
management must be scientifically worked out and applied.
Scientific management is scientific as it subjects the labor
operations on each job, each specific job to be performed in a
factory, to a testing out of the energy consumed; to discovering
how to secure labor's maximum productivity without waste of time or
energy. It is scientific as the manager's state of mind towards the
physical and psychological reactions of the workers is one of inquiry
and a readiness to accept, as facts of mechanical science are
accepted, the reaction of the workers. A scientific manager, or
engineer as he is often called, bears the same relation to the labor
force in a factory that an electrical engineer bears to the electrical
equipment. If his attention to the emotional reaction of the workers
is less detached than scientific standards require, it must be
remembered that he is trying to make adjustments which must first of
all meet definite business conditions. Where the reactions of the
workers interfere with the whole scheme of business administration,
(and interfere they ceaselessly do), he has to substitute measures
which are not strictly speaking scientific. On these occasions he
adopts humanitarian schemes, which are generally spoken of as welfare
work. It is the introduction of these schemes which look like a "slop
over" from science to charity, that makes it difficult for outsiders
to tell just what scientific management is and what it is not.
Mr. Frederick W. Taylor, the founder of scientific management, was
capable of scientific detachment in studying working men in relation
to the specific job. He was able more notably than others had been
before him, and more than many who have followed him, to extend the
impersonal state of mind, which he enjoyed in the study of inorganic
energy, to his study of human energy. Mr. Taylor's interest did not
emanate from sympathy with labor in its hardships; his interest was
centered in an effort to conserve and apply labor energy with maximum
economy for wealth production. Mr. Taylor awakened the consciousness
of industrial managers to the fact that the energy of workers like the
power of machinery is subject to laws. He demonstrated that it was
possible in specific operations to discover how the highest degree of
energy could be attained and the largest output result, without
loss through fatigue. He showed how efficiency could be enhanced by
transferring the responsibility of standards of work from the workers
to the managers. He formulated, as a business and industry doctrine,
that a definite relation between the expenditure of labor energy and
the labor reward could be established; that the wage incentive, if
applied to labor in relation to energy expended, would yield, or might
be expected to yield increased returns. These incentives, rewards,
stimuli, which employers could apply would produce, he stated with
unscientific fervor, the workers' initiative. The inability of Mr.
Taylor and other scientific managers to distinguish between initiative
and short lived reaction to stimulus is simple evidence that their
scientific experiments were confined to comparisons which they could
make between a yield in wealth where the stimulus to labor is weak,
and a yield where it is strong. They will not discover what a worker's
productivity is, or might be, when incited by his impulse to work, nor
will they secure labor's initiative, until they release the factors,
latent in industry, which have inspirational, creative force.
The attitude of Mr. Taylor and his followers, however, differs from
that of the ordinary manager who maintains an irritated disregard of
the disturbing elements instead of accepting them and, as far as is
consistent with business principles, allaying or cajoling them. The
significant contributions which scientific management has made are in
line with the experiments originally introduced by Mr. Taylor. They
call for the study of each new task by the management, for discovering
the economy in the expenditure of labor energy before it is submitted
to the working force; the standardizing of the task in conformity with
the findings; the teaching of the approved methods to the working
force; the introduction of incentives which will insure the full
response of labor in the accomplishment of the task. Beside the
standardizing of tasks and the relating the wage to the fixed
standard, scientific management has made intensive experiments in
the scheduling of the various operations to be performed, which are
divided among the working force, so that no one operation is held up
awaiting the completion of another. It has shown in this connection
that work can be "routed" so that the time of workers is not lost. The
most successfully managed factories also plan their annual product
so that employment will be continuous. They have discovered that the
periods of unemployment seriously affect the personnel of a labor
force and they estimate that the turnover of the labor force which
requires the constant breaking in of new men is an item of serious
financial loss. The Ford Automobile Works at one time hired 50,000 men
in one year while not employing at any one time more than 14,000. They
estimated that the cost of breaking in a new man averaged $70.00. To
reduce this cost, they instituted profit sharing, as an incentive for
men to remain. Other factories have estimated the cost of replacing
men from $50.00 to $200.00. A rubber concern in Ohio has a labor
turnover of 150 per cent. In connection with the effort to reduce the
turnover in the labor force the management of well organized factories
takes great care to estimate a worker's value before employing him.
The policy of transferring a man from one department to another where
he is better suited yields evidently valuable results. In factories
where there is effort to hold labor, to make employment continuous,
the turnover has been reduced in some cases to as low as 18 per cent.
Generally, however, it is still high; frequently as high as 50 per
cent, and 50 per cent is still considered low, even in factories which
have given the subject much consideration.
There is a tendency in developing the mechanics of efficiency, as they
relate to labor, to establish for machine production standards of
workmanship. Long and weary experience has proved that wage earners
under factory methods and machine conditions are not interested in
maintaining standards of work. The standards which are set by the
scientific management schemes of efficiency are not, to be sure, the
qualitative standards of craftsmanship but they are qualitative as
well as quantitative standards of machine work. The tendency to
establish standards should have educational significance for workers.
It would have, if the responsibility for setting standards as well
as maintaining them rested in any measure with the workers; it would
have, that is, if the workers had the interest in workmanship, which
as things now stand they have not. The point in scientific management
is that efficiency depends, wholly depends they believe, on
centralizing the responsibility for setting and maintaining
workmanship standards, on transferring the responsibility for
standards of work from workers who do it, to the management who
directs it done. I have learned of only one manager who realizes
that although the factory workers are not to be trusted to maintain
standards, a management nevertheless will fail to get the workers'
full coöperation until it arouses their interest in maintaining them.
The manager is Mr. Robert Wolf, who illustrated this point at a
meeting of the Taylor Society in March, 1917. In describing the
process of extracting the last possible amount of water from paper
pulp, he said:
"Our problem was to determine the best length of time to keep the
low pressure on, as the high, pressure is governed entirely by the
production coming from the wet machine. After having determined
that three minutes of low pressure ... gives maximum moisture
test, we furnished each man on the wet machines with a clock and
asked him to leave this low pressure on just three minutes. As
long as the foremen kept constantly after their men and vigilantly
followed them up we obtained some slight increase in the test; but
it required a constant urging upon our part to focus the attention
of the men upon this three minute time of low pressure.... We
realized finally that in order to get the results we were after,
it was necessary for us to produce _a desire_ upon the part of
our men to do this work in the proper way ... so we designed an
instrument which would give us a record of the time lost between
pressing operations, also the number of minutes the low pressure
was kept on. It took us something over a year to perfect this
machine, but after it was finally perfected and a record of the
operations made, we found that the men actually were operating at
an average efficiency of 42 per cent, and our moisture test was
running about 54 per cent. Our next step was to post a daily
record of the relative standing of the men in the machine room,
putting the men who had the best record at the top of the list, in
the order of their weekly average efficiencies. (The efficiency of
low pressure, which proved to be the most important factor, was
computed by calling three minutes of low pressure 100 per cent and
two minutes either way 0 per cent.) As a result of simply posting
this record our efficiencies rose to over 60 per cent and our
moisture test increased a little less than 1 per cent. Some of the
best and most skilled men had an efficiency of over 80 per cent,
but quite a large percentage of them were down below 50 per cent.
We therefore decided that it was necessary to have the foreman
give more detailed information to the men as to what the machine
meant and how their efficiencies were obtained and to put the
instrument which did the recording into a glass case in the
machine room where all the men could see it. Each foreman took a
portion of the chart and one of the celluloid scales by which, we
obtained the efficiencies and explained in detail to each one of
the men how their records were calculated. As a result of this,
our efficiency rose from 60 per cent to 80 per cent in less than
four weeks, and it has remained at 80 per cent ever since--(ever
since being over two years)--enabling us to get a moisture of over
56 per cent."[A]
[Footnote A: Bulletin of the Taylor Society--March, 1917.]
This was accomplished, Mr. Wolf told them, without resorting to piece
work or bonus or any of the special methods of payments, their
men being hired by the day throughout the entire plant. Mr. Wolf
accomplished the result by giving meaning to a meaningless task,
by letting the men see for themselves how they arrived at results,
letting them see the different processes of getting results and
knowing on their own account which were the most valuable.
There may be other managers who appreciate the value of letting men
in on the experimental effort of getting results but it is not the
practice to do so and it is opposed to the idea of transferring
the responsibility from the workshop to the manager's office or
laboratory. Because of this practice the educational value of
establishing standards of workmanship is lost so far as the workers
are concerned. Mr. Wolf's criticism of orthodox scientific management
and his conclusions are illuminating; they are indeed revolutionary
in nature as they come from a manager of a successful industrial
enterprise:
"Our efforts, ever since we began to realize the workman's point
of view, have been not to take responsibility from him. It is our
plan to increase his responsibility and we feel that it is our
duty to teach him to exercise his reasoning power and intelligence
to its fullest extent. There is _no advantage gained by
stimulating a man's reasoning power, and through this means his
creative faculty, if the management relieves the man of the
responsibility for each individual operation_. The opportunity
for self expression, which is synonymous with joy in work, is
something that the workman is entitled to, and we employers who
feel that management is to become a true science must begin to
think less of the science of material things and think more of
the science of human relationships. Our industries must become
_humanized_, otherwise there will be no relief from the present
state of unrest in the industries of the world.
"In this connection it might be well to observe that our
experience in the pulp industry has been that instructions which
go _too much into detail_ tend to deaden interest in the work. We
realize fully the value of sufficient instructions to get uniform
results, but we try to leave as much as possible to the judgment
of the individual operator, making our instructions take more
the form of constant _teaching of principles_ involved in the
operation than of definite _fixed rules_ of procedure. It is
necessary to produce a desire in the heart of the workman to do
good work. No amount of coercion will enlist him thoroughly in the
service.
"The new efficiency is going to reckon a great deal more with the
needs of the individual man; but in order to do this, it must have
some philosophical conception of the reason for man's existence.
_It is beginning to be understood that when we deny to vast
numbers of individuals the opportunity to do creative work, we are
violating a great universal law_."
Scientific management is sacrificing educational opportunity latent
in the realization of workmanship standards in the same way that
machinery sacrificed it. They both curtail the workers' chance to
discover first-hand what the processes of fabrication are, the
processes in which they are involved; they must adopt ready-made
methods of doing their work, they must accept them out of hand without
questioning, or chance to question, their validity. Workers endowed
with good health and moral vigor resist these attempts to put
something over on them, irrespective of their good or evil results.
The workers have resisted machinery not only because as individuals
they were thrown, out of jobs for a time or lost them permanently, but
because the machine imposed on them a method of work, of activity over
which they had no control. Scientific management has undertaken to
gather up whatever bits of initiative the machine had not already
taken over and to hand back to the workers at the bench directions
for them to follow with a blind ability to accept instruction. It is
incredible to factory managers that workers object to being taught
"right" ways of doing things. Their objection is not to being taught,
but to being told that some one way is right without having had the
chance to know why, or whether indeed it is the right way. This
resistance to being taught, it seems, is nothing more nor less than a
wayward desire of a worker to do his own way because it is his way,
and of course from the managers' point of view, that is stupid. It
is stupid, but the stupidity is in the situation. What does this
waywardness of the worker to do his own way suggest? Not that he has
a way worth bothering about but that he wants to exercise the
quality which all industrial managers agree he does not possess--his
initiative. Now a man who has the desire to exercise initiative and
does not know how to put anything through is not only a useless person
in society but the most pestiferous fellow in existence. Allowing that
he is does not mean that he has not the power of initiative or that he
could not have learned to put this initiative to good use, if at any
time in his manhood or youth he had been taught to use it, instead of
being required to follow the accepted ways of doing things without
having had the experience of trial and error. Schools and factory
management give workers scant opportunity to discover whether they
have initiative or have not.
Mr. Wolf finds that "while it is possible, under certain conditions,
to compel obedience, there is no possible way in which a man can be
compelled to do his work willingly and when he does it unwillingly he
is far from being efficient. He must have the opportunity to enjoy
his work and realize himself in its performance." "In our plant,"
he remarks, "we never made it a practice to determine arbitrarily
standard methods for performing an operation, for we believe that
the men who are actually doing the work have generally as much to
contribute as the foremen and department heads in deciding standard
practices; and because we give the workman the chance to have the most
to say about the matter, he is willing to conform to the standard,
because it really represents a concensus of opinion of the men in his
particular group." It is significant in this connection to remember
that he does not pay the men by special methods to get the return. "I
am not necessarily opposed to piece work or task and bonus methods
of payment.... We have been able to obtain splendid results without
resorting to a system of immediate money rewards." He thinks it is
better to pay the workers liberally so that they "can forget this
economic pressure and do good work because of the joy that comes from
the consciousness of work well done."
Scientific management like ordinary management as a matter of fact
does not want to cultivate initiative in the rank and file of workers;
it would like to find more of it; and its eternal expectation is that
enough of it will rise out of the oppressive atmosphere of the factory
system to supply its limited needs. Scientific management especially
wants this, as it must have more foremen and teachers to carry forward
its advanced schemes of organization. But every manager will tell you
that industry does not produce men with sufficient initiative to
fill these positions. Their estimates of the number of men found in
industry who have initiative varies from one to five per cent. The
rest they believe are born, routine workers. They speak of their
limitations as native. Managers do not stop to consider that their
judgments are based wholly on the reaction of the mass of wage workers
to the special stimuli which they offer. They say also that high
school and college boys show up very little if any better in respect
to initiative than the lower school product. The truth is that schools
and colleges are more concerned with passing on the standards of an
older generation to a younger, and the younger that generation is
the less it is entrusted with opportunity to make its own first hand
inquiries. That is, the lower schools which deal with a generation at
its most plastic time, furnish the higher schools with minds inured to
the pressure of accepting subject matter without independent inquiry
or curiosity.
Factory management like college and school management, instead of
depending on the subject matter to interest the workers, instead of
opening up to them the factors of interest in industrial enterprise,
has adopted incentives for getting the required work done. Enlightened
school practice, out of long failure to get the children's initiative
by the artificial stimulus of rewards for work done, now depends upon
the content of the subject matter and the children's experiments with
it, to develop their desire to do the work. The practice of depending
on school rewards instead of interest in subject matter is largely
responsible for superficial knowledge and lack of ability to think as
well as to act. As schools fail to incite the interest of the children
they train them to put through this and that task and reward them for
it without having added to their power of undertaking tasks on their
own account. Indeed, as they fail to give them the chance to do that,
they actually decrease whatever power they may have had.
The doing of tasks in factories for the sake of rewards, gives the
workers experience in winning rewards. As they are interested only
in the reward, they carry away no desire or interest in the work
experience. As the method of doing the work is prescribed in every
detail and their only requirement, under scientific management, is to
follow directions with accuracy, they are trained to do their tasks as
the children in school are trained. They are trained in routine, and
to do each task as it is given. This is not education, it is training
to do tricks. The worker does not take over what can be called
experience from one task to another. He forms certain motor habits,
called skill. But under the efficient methods of scientific management
the acquirement of this skill is robbed even of the educational value
that it had under the unscientific method of factory work, which
within its limited field, left the worker to discover by trial and
error what were the best methods of getting results. Moreover, the
standards of workmanship which scientific management sets up are not
the worker's own standards; he has had no part in the making of
them or in deciding on the comparative merits of the results. He
accomplishes the results as he follows directions, not for the sake of
the result, not for the sake of good workmanship, but for the reward.
As I have said scientific management has given the subject of
incentives the same careful thought that it has given to the study of
lost energy. The two important incentives for inducing the response
of labor to productive enterprises which scientific management has
carried forward in their applications, are wages and promotion.
The general assumption is that the wage as an incentive has no
limitations, except the physical limitation of a human being in
response to stimulus. And surely it is true that the chance to "make
money" is to-day the most powerful stimulus in use. But thoughtful
managers of industrial enterprise tell you, incredible as it may seem,
that the worker's objection to applying himself to his task is not
invariably overcome by anticipation of the wage return; he will slack
or be perverse or throw over a job in the face of opportunities to
earn as good a wage or a better one than he can get elsewhere. It is
well known that workers joint unions in the face of opposition of
employers and at the risk of losing permanent positions.
A resourceful manager in one of the most intelligently managed plants
in the United States told me that women were less susceptible than men
to the wage incentive. He found that many of them are content when
their wage covers a sum which represents for them their personal
requirements; that they cannot interest them in trying for more. On
that account the manager takes up the case of the individual girl to
see if her ambition to earn more money cannot be stimulated. They find
sometimes that a mother requires her daughter to give in her whole
wage at the end of the week and that the girl has no pleasure in the
spending of it; they visit the mother and persuade her to let the girl
keep a proportion of her wage and point out to the mother that she is
limiting the girl's ambition. They also find girls who have entire
control over the spending of their wages, who are without ambition to
earn over and above a certain sum because that sum will meet their
own recognized needs. The case of these girls the management tries to
cover by encouraging them to save for vacations and other purposes
which they offer by way of suggestion. In both of these instances the
management undertakes to create new wants or ways of realizing wants
which were not recognized by the workers themselves. The satisfaction
of these wants may or may not be in the direction of extending
experience and expanding contacts. But that is neither here nor there.
The point is, the manager of the industry has used an incentive for
increasing production which has no relation to production itself.
He is forced to do this because he fails to make the process of
production a matter of interest to the worker. The processes of
production do not of themselves as we know compel the workers'
application or stimulate their desire for productive enterprise.
It is in the nature of the case impossible to increase the wage
incentive indefinitely. One large and scientifically managed plant has
made remarkable provisions for staving off the time when the dead line
is reached. They have taken stock account of the labor power they
require, the amount of energy which each worker possesses, for the
purpose of evaluation and payment. They have undertaken to cover as
separate items each condition which affects a worker's relation to
his job. They rate as separate items the worker's proficiency,
reliability, continuity in service, indirect charges, increased cost
of living, and periods of lay-off; they rate him according to the
number of technical processes he is proficient in, whether or not he
is engaged on more than one; they rate him if he attends the night
school connected with the factory and shows in this way a disposition
to learn other operations than, those he already knows. Why, they
wonder, does only ten per cent of the force take advantage of the
school and what, they are eager to find out, can they do further to
secure the men's coöperation. For "coöperation," they say, "in a
special way deserves credit, since it is unexpected ... certain well
defined acts of coöperation will bring extra reward." Their rewards so
carefully calculated did not seem to enlist response as spiritual in
its nature as coöperation. It seemed that they had reached "the dead
line" where wage stimulus fails to draw its hoped for response.
To get from the workers the highest efficiency the scientifically
managed plants pay for a task a stated rate based on piece or time; if
the task is performed within the time set and the directions for doing
the task as laid out by the management, are followed, the worker
receives in addition to the regular rate, a bonus. Mr. H.L. Grant,
while working with Mr. Taylor, discovered that there was weakness in
the system of paying bonuses, and the weakness was not overcome until
he devised a method of paying the workman for the time allowed plus
a percentage of that time according to what he did. This method he
declares constantly induced further effort and overcame what they
discovered was the weakness in a flat bonus. As fair or as superior as
this bonus may be in relation to the prevailing rate in the market,
managers say that the workers are apt in time to fall below the
standard as their work becomes routine, unless the incentive after a
time is increased or changed in character. In other words the wage
incentive is like a virus injection. The dose is not continuously
effective, except as the amount is increased or altered.
A usual method of keeping alive the financial incentive is profit
sharing and schemes for participation in profits, but they are rewards
of general merit and bids for continuity of service; they have no
direct relation to the workers' efficiency and compliance with
standards which distinguish the wage rewards of scientifically managed
plants.
Promotion, the incentive second in importance to the wage incentive,
is of assistance in postponing the time when the dead line for the
worker is reached. Nothing better illustrates the limitations of
promotion in this respect than the fact that in factories where
the turnover is the lowest, the opportunity to promote the workers
decreases; it falls in proportion to the length of their term of
service. That is, chances for promotion are the lowest in factories
where conditions otherwise are favorable to the worker. In the factory
where the turnover is only 18 per cent the management says that
promotion is a negligible factor. Where the turnover is high there is
greater opportunity in plants scientifically managed than in others to
promote men, as the scheme of organization calls for a larger number
of what they call "functionalized foremen" and teachers in proportion
to the working force.
It is as I have said, on account of the necessity of these positions
in the general scheme that managers of factories are interested in
finding more men who have initiative, than industry under their
direction has produced.
Before scientific management was discovered, business management and
machinery already had robbed industry of productive incentives, of the
real incentive to production; a realization on the part of the worker
of its social value and his appreciation of its creative content. All
that was left for scientific management to gather together for its
direction were bits of experience which workers gained by their own
experimental efforts at how best to handle tools. Their efforts it
is true were not sufficiently great in this direction to promise
progressive industrial advance. The margin for experiment which was
still theirs was not sufficiently largo to insure continued effort
inspired by an interest in the work.
When we have taken into full account the repressive effect of
scientific management on initiative, we may well admit an advantage:
educationally speaking, the repression is direct. The workers are
fully aware that they are doing what some one else requires of them.
They are not under the delusion that they are acting on their own
initiative. They are being managed and they know it and all
things being equal (which they are not) they do not like it. The
responsibility they may clearly see and feel rests with them to find a
better scheme for carrying industry forward. The methods of scientific
management are calculated to incite not only open criticism from
the workers but to suggest that efficient industry is a matter of
learning, and that learning is a game at which all can play, if the
opportunity is provided.
Scientific managers have hoped that their plans to conserve energy
and increase the wage in relation to expenditure of energy would meet
little opposition. They also have hoped that the paternalistic feature
of welfare work would allay opposition. But I am not inclined
to include the welfare schemes in a consideration of scientific
management; they have little light to throw on what educational
significance there is in the efficiency methods which scientific
management has introduced in industry. The playgrounds attached to
factories, the indoor provisions for social activity, the clubs, while
not having an acknowledged relation to the scientific management
of the factory and while repudiated by some managers, are a common
feature of plants which claim to be scientifically managed. There are
scientifically managed plants which object to the recreational and
other features which have to do with matters outside the province of
the factory, on the ground that it is a meddling with the personal
side of people's lives. "A baseball game connected with the factory,"
said the educational manager of a certain plant, "has the effect of
limiting the workers' contacts; it is much better for them, as it is
for every one, not to narrow their relationships to a small group, but
to play ball with the people of the town." It is significant that this
concern deals with the union and conforms to its regulations. Whether
this more generous concept of the workers' lives yields more in
manufactured goods than one that confines the activity of the workers
to the factory in which they labor, scientific management, so far as I
know, has not discovered.
The very nature of the welfare schemes suggests that they are inspired
more out of fear of the workers' freedom of contact than launched on
account of comparative findings which relate strictly to the economy
of labor power. The policy of leaving the workers free, it was clear
in the instance just cited, had been adopted out of a personal
preference for freedom in relationships. The introduction of clinics,
rest rooms, restaurants, sanitary provisions, and all arrangements
relating directly to the workers' health have a bearing on efficiency
and productivity which is well recognized and probably universally
endorsed by efficiency managers, even if they are not invariably
adopted.
Scientific management wants two things; more men in the labor market
to fill the positions of functionalized foremen, more men than modern
industrial society has produced; and it wants an army of workers who
will follow directions, follow them as one of the managers said, as
soldiers follow them. It wants this army to be endowed as well with
the impulse to produce. It may by its methods realize one of its
wants, that is, an army of workers to follow directions; but as it
succeeds in this, as it is successful in robbing industry of its
content, and as it reduces processes to routine, it will limit its
chances to find foremen who have initiative and it will fail to get
from workers the impulse to produce goods.
During the last four years, under the stress of a consuming war every
stimulus employed by business management for speeding up production
has been advanced. Organized efficiency in the handling of materials
has increased the output, as increased rewards to capital and labor
have stimulated effort. But the quantitative demand of consumption
requirements is insatiable. It is not humanly possible under the
present industrial arrangements to satisfy the world's demand for
goods, either in time of war or peace. It was never more apparent than
it is now, that an increase in a wage rate is a temporary expedient
and that wage rewards are not efficient media for securing sustained
interest in productive enterprise. It is becoming obvious that the
wage system has not the qualifications for the coördination of
industrial life. As the needs of the nations under the pressure of war
have brought out the inefficiencies of the economic institution, it
has become sufficiently clear to those responsible for the conduct of
the war and to large sections of the civil population, that wealth
exploitation and wealth creation are not synonymous; that the
production of wealth must rest on other motives than the desire of
individuals to get as much and give as little as particular situations
will stand.
In England and in the United States, where the individualistic
conception of the industrial life has been an inherent part of our
national philosophy, the governments, with cautious reservations, have
assumed responsibilities which had been carried in normal times by
business. Because business administration had been dependent for its
existence on a scheme of profiteering it is not in the position where
it can appeal to labor to contribute its productive power in the
spirit of patriotic abandon. But governments as they have taken over
certain industrial responsibilities are in a better position to make
such appeals to capital as well as to labor.
The calculable effect of the appeal to capital to assume the
responsibility is in the long run of passing importance, as under the
present business arrangement that is the position capital occupies. In
other words, the appeal will mark no change in capitalist psychology
as it promises to do in the case of labor.
The calculable effect on labor psychology may have revolutionary
significance. It is quite another sort of appeal in its effect from
the stereotyped and familiar one of employers to labor to _feel_ their
responsibility. That appeal never reached the consciousness of working
men for the reason that it is impossible to feel responsible or to be
responsible where there is no chance of bearing the responsibility.
Experiencing responsibility in industry means nothing more nor less
than sharing in the decisions, the determination of procedure, as well
as suffering from the failure of those decisions and participating in
their successful eventuation. As the governments in the present case
have made their appeals to labor they have carried the suggestion of
partnership in responsibility because the government is presumably the
people's voice and its needs also presumably are the common needs and
not the special interests of individuals. It is hardly necessary to
point out that it was not the intention of government officials who
made the appeal to excite a literal interpretation; they did not
expect to be taken so seriously and up to date they have not been
taken more seriously than they intended by American labor. All they
mean and what they expect to gain, is what employers have meant and
wanted; that is labor's surrender of its assumed right to strike
on the job, its surrender of its organized time standards and its
principle of collective bargaining. But when officials speak in the
name of a government what they mean is unimportant; what it means to
the people to have them speak, and the people's interpretation of what
they say, is the important matter.
These appeals of the governments in this time of war to the working
people have the tendency to clear the environment of the suggestion
that common labor, that is the wage earning class (as distinguished
from salaried people, employers and the profiteers pure and simple)
are incompetent to play a responsible part in the work of wealth
production. A responsible part does not mean merely doing well a
detached and technical job; it means facing the risks and sharing in
the experimental experience of productive enterprise as it serves the
promotion of creative life and the needs of an expanding civilization.
As the appeals of the governments at this time bear the stamp of a
nation's will, its valuation and respect for common labor, there
is the chance, it seems, that they may carry to the workers the
energizing thought that _all_ the members of the industrial group must
assume, actually assume, responsibility for production, if production
is to advance. Equally important in the interest of creative work is
the power of these appeals to shift the motive for production from
the acquisitive to the creative impulse. In the midst of the world's
emergency, driven by the fear of destruction the nations have turned
instinctively to the _unused_ creative force in human and common
labor, that is to the ability of the wage earner to think and plan. If
the response of labor is genuine, if with generous abandon it releases
its full productive energy, it is quite certain as matters now stand
that neither the governments nor the financiers are prepared to accept
the consequence.
If labor in answer to these appeals gains the confidence that it is
competent to carry industrial responsibility, or rather that common
labor, together with the trained technicians in mechanics and
industrial organization are competent _as a producing group_ to carry
the responsibility, one need we may be sure will be eliminated which,
has been an irritating and an unproductive element in industrial life;
I mean the need the workers have had for the cultivation of class
isolation. As the workers become in the estimation of a community and
in their own estimation, responsible members of a society, their more
rather than less abortive effort to develop class feeling in America,
will disappear. Under those conditions concerted class action will be
confined to the employers of labor and the profiteers, who will be
placed in the position of proving their value and their place in the
business of wealth creation. On this I believe we may count, that
labor will drop its defensive program for a constructive one, as it
comes to appreciate its own creative potentiality.
* * * * *
Judging from recent events in England, where the government appeals
to labor have had longer time to take effect, it seems that new brain
tracks in labor psychology have actually been created. English labor
apparently is beginning to take the impassioned appeals of its
government seriously and is making ready to assume the responsibility
for production. The resolutions adopted by the Labor Party at its
Nottingham Conference in November in 1917 covered organized labor's
usual defense program relating to wage conditions. The Manifesto which
was issued was first of all a political document, written and compiled
for campaign purposes. But the significance of the party's action
is the new interpretation which it is beginning to give industrial
democracy. It is evident where state ownership is contemplated that
the old idea that industry would pass under the administrative
direction of government officials, is replaced by the growing
intention and desire of labor to assume responsibility for
administration whether industry is publicly or privately owned. The
Party stands for the "widest possible participation both economic and
political ... in industry as well as in government." In explanation
of the Manifesto, the leader of the Party is quoted in the Manchester
Guardian as saying, that when labor now speaks of industrial democracy
it no longer means what it did before the war; it does not mean
political administration of economic affairs; it means primarily
industrial self-government.
* * * * *
Perhaps an even better evidence of the intention of English labor in
this direction is the movement towards decentralization in the trade
union organization. This movement, known as the "shop-stewards"
movement is essentially an effort of the men in the workshops to
assume responsibility in industrial reconstruction after the war, a
responsibility which they have heretofore under all circumstances
delegated to representatives not connected directly with the work in
the shops. As these representatives were isolated from actual problems
of workshop production and alien therefore to the problems in their
technical and specific application, they were incapable of functioning
efficiently as agents of productive enterprise. This "shop stewards"
movement recognizes and provides for the interdependence of industrial
interests, but at the same time it concerns itself with the competent
handling of specific matters.
Such organization as the movement in England seems to be evolving, the
syndicalists have contended for as they opposed the German idea of
state socialism. But the syndicalists in their propaganda did not
_develop_ the idea of industry as an adventure in creative enterprise.
Instead they emphasized, as did the political socialists and the trade
unionists, the importance of protecting the workers' share in the
possession of wealth. They made the world understand that business
administration of industry exploited labor, but they did not bring out
that both capital and labor, so far as it was possible for each to
do, exploited wealth. That was not the vision of industry which they
carried from their shops to their meetings or indeed to their homes.
Their failure at exploitation was too obvious.
An interesting illustration of what would happen in the ranks of
the syndicalists if the business idea of labor's intellectual and
emotional incapacity for functioning, gave way before a community's
confidence in the capacity of labor--we have in the case of the
migratory workers in the harvesting of our western crops. The
harvesters who follow the crops with the seasons from the southern to
the northern borders of the United States and into Canada are members
of the most uncompromisingly militant organization of syndicalists,
The Industrial Workers of the World. On an average it takes ten years
for these harvesters to become skilled workers and these men, members
of this condemned organization, are the most highly skilled harvesters
in the country. On account of their revolutionary doctrines and their
combined determination to reap rewards as well as crops, they are
considered and treated like outlaws, and outlaws of the established
order they are in spirit. When the owners of the farms of North Dakota
realized that their own returns on the harvests were diverted in the
marketing of their grain, they combined for protection against the
grain exchanges and the elevator trusts. While developing their
movement they discovered that the natural alliance for their
organization to make was with the men who were involved with them
in the production of grain. And as the farmers have accepted the
harvesters as partners they have formed in effect a coördinated
producing combination. Without finally settling the problem of
agriculture, they have strengthened the production group and
eliminated strife at the most vital point.
In the period of reconstruction the industrial issues of significance
to democracy will be whether or not management of industry as it has
been assumed by the state for the purpose of war shall revert after
the war to the condition of incompetency which the war emergency
disclosed or whether state management shall be extended and developed
as it was in Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. Fortunately,
these evidences of a new interest of labor in industry as a social
institution, give us some reason to hope that we shall not be confined
to a choice between business incompetency and state socialism. The
evidence of the desire on the part of the labor force to participate
in the development of production is the factor we should keep in
mind in any plans for democratic industrial reconstruction. It is
inevitable that an effort to open up and cultivate this desire
of labor will be regarded by the present governing forces with
apprehension. The movement of labor in this direction is now looked
upon with suspicion even by people who are not in a position of
control. The general run of people in fact outside of those who
recognize labor as a fundamental force in industrial reconstruction,
conceive of the labor people as an irresponsible mass of men and view
their movements as expressions of an irresponsible desire to seize
responsibility. They are the men who are not experienced in business
affairs and therefore cannot, it is believed, be trusted. The
arguments against trusting them are the same old arguments advanced
for many centuries against inroads on the established order of
over-lordship. But over-lordship has flourished at all times, and in
the present scheme of industry it flourishes as it always has,
in proportion to the reluctance of the people to participate as
responsible factors in matters of common concern. Corruption and
exploitation of governments and of industry are dependent upon the
broadest possible participation of a whole people in the experience
and responsibilities of their common life. It is for this reason that
we need to foster and develop the opportunity as well as the desire
for responsibility among the common people.
After the war, it is to be hoped that America will undertake to
realize through its schemes for reconstruction its present _ideals_ of
self-government. As it does this, we shall discover that the issues
which are of significance to democracy are of significance to
education; for democracy and education are processes concerned with,
the people's ability to solve their problems through their experience
in solving them. If America is ever to realize its concept of
political democracy, it can accept neither the autocratic method of
business management nor the bureaucratic schemes of state socialism.
It cannot realize political democracy until it realizes in a large
measure the democratic administration of industry.